In my previous edition of Sports news on Twitter I found that the ESPN feeds espn and SportsCenter were by far the most popular. I concluded by wondering if the ESPN feeds are actually better, or popular simply due to the ubiquity of ESPN in sports reporting.
I now look for meaningful trends in the number of characters per tweet for each sports feed. Violin plots of tweet length show that Deadspin tends to have the shortest tweets whereas SportsCenter is the most verbose.
Notice how the espn feed has a uniquely broad distribution even at smaller tweet lengths. The shape of the espn violin plot means that tweet lengths vary quite a bit. Comparing tweet length variation for all feeds shows that espn and FOXSports have the most variation in tweet length (see plot below). Interestingly, USATODAYsports and sportingnews have the least amount of variation in tweet length and the fewest followers.
Do highly variable tweet lengths make for a better Twitter feed?
I think they do; who wants to follow the guy who always fills up his 140 character limitation? Although I don’t think that tweet length variation makes the espn feed popular, it does contribute to making it better. It is certainly premature to declare a winner for the sports news Twitter analysis, but tweet length variation is probably a good metric to help inform that decision.
What do you think?
Next time: URLs in sports tweets