Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Flipboard 0 The CIA made its grand entrance into the Twitter universe on June 6th. It greeted the world with a very clever and humorous introduction: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” The initial result was an immediate surge in follower count. In the first 24 hours, the CIA had gathered over 200,000 followers. By June 10th, the number had topped 600,000. The majority of the conversation over the first two days (about 87%) involved the retweeting or restating of the CIA’s now famous first tweet. A segment amounting to roughly 10% added their own positive commentary, generally applauding the CIA’s “sense of humor.” Only 3% of posts could be classified as negative, which were, for the most part, expressed through another type of humor: sarcasm. Hahaha…CIA has a good sense of humor! :) “@CIA: We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” — Sandeep Rath (@sandeep1236) June 6, 2014 The metrics of this conversation change more abruptly, over the first two days, when retweets are taken out of the total picture. The resulting image is a bit more distributed. The neutral category is 35% and consists primarily of people restating (not retweeting) the first tweet. 34% of the conversation is now positive, consisting of posts including the text of the CIA’s first tweet along with positive commentary or merely positive statements. Again, the CIA is applauded for its use of humor and positive sentiment remained high. But another significant difference from the analysis including retweets is the percentage of conversation considered to be negative, totaling 31%. The comments are harder to track in this category but consist of verbal attacks on the agency and its practices or sarcastic expressions or interpretations of the first tweet. Seriously doubt the @CIA is only following 25 people. — Jason Gay (@jasongay) June 6, 2014 The flurry of interest and follower growth took place over the first five days of the handle’s presence in the Twitter sphere. The followers of the CIA handle plateaued around June 10th and remain in the low to mid 600,000s. The engagement, particularly in regard to retweets and comments, has also significantly decreased from the opening of the account. Potential impressions for the first tweet totaled 55 million. The closest runner up was the second tweet made on June 7th, which totaled a mere 5.6 million. The CIA’s activity and the nature of its posts have been interesting to follow as they continue in their use of the platform. For instance, their habit, up until June 11th (excluding the weekend), was to tweet once a day. But on June 11th, there was a conference they were participating in at Georgetown. Throughout this particular day, they tweeted twenty-eight times expressing slight hesitation through a basic question in their penultimate tweet, “Too many speech tweets earlier today?” Too many speech tweets earlier today? #lessonlearned #transparency — CIA (@CIA) June 11, 2014 The highest levels of engagement and reach in the Twitter universe took place during the opening days of the CIA’s account. The bar graph below shows the apexes of interaction, both retweets and comments, which took place on the first and second days. But rapidly after this surge, activity steadily fell to much more modest and consistent levels. This is something one might logically anticipate with the entrance of such an organization to Twitter. Nevertheless, there is another interesting angle we are able to examine at Crimson Hexagon in reference to the sentiment of these numbers. One of the analyses mentioned at the beginning of this post looked at the overall sentiment numbers of the CIA joining Twitter, while excluding all retweets. The conversation, over the first two days, was split pretty evenly between positive, negative and neutral posts. But what is interesting is when you expand this data over a longer timeframe. What becomes evident, from the proportion graph below, is a steady movement toward negative sentiment. Volume analysis can show us one thing, as we have already seen, but this proportional view allows us to see this other angle. It allows us to see the nature and character or the conversation within these relatively equal daily volume levels. No, we don’t know where Tupac is. #twitterversary — CIA (@CIA) July 7, 2014 This is clearly valuable information to any organization desiring to understand people’s opinion about them and how conversation sentiment shifts, even when volume levels remain relatively stable.The CIA may be content with more modest daily conversation levels (I mean we are talking about the CIA), but direction of sentiment levels is definitely something well worth exploring. It will be interesting to watch the development of the CIA’s Twitter usage and whether they will continue with their current approach or experiment with other strategies. For now it is interesting merely to ponder the way a government organization known for secrecy opens itself in the realm of social media. To learn more in how government agencies and brands can use social intelligence to understand the nuances of positive and negative social sentiment, we invite you to download our study on social media value to government agencies. Twitter Tweet Facebook Share Email This article originally appeared on Crimson Hexagon » Blog and has been republished with permission.Find out how to syndicate your content with B2C Author: Matt BemisView full profile ›