Eat And Tweet

At a recent PepsiCo Food Service digital summit one statistic shared was that there were 400,000 tweets a day from people saying how hungry they were. It’s second nature for us to talk about food all the time; so much so that an academic paper has even looked at the food vocabulary on the social platform.

The paper, titled ‘The representation of food in the social media forum Twitter’, broke down the food vocabulary into categories in the food chain — consumers, logistics, retailing, agriculture and society. Data was collected from Twitter over a four-day period in January 2013. And, more than 90,000 tweets were analysed.

From a user standpoint, the study finds that consumers were the most represented area of the food chain, and logistics the least. Consumers had 51.50 per cent of the users and 87.42 per cent of the top words were tweeted from that part of the food chain.

Significantly, many of the food tweets talked about sustainability, science, hunger and waste — showing where the concerns of the world lie.

CEO BUZZ
The Set To Follow
If you were mulling over which executives to follow on Twitter, this will surely interest you. lnformation portal worldofceos.com has come up with a first-of-its-kind ranking of the top 30 CEOs on social media — it takes into account both qualitative and quantitative factors. Not surprisingly, Richard Branson, the media-savvy Virgin boss, leads the list. Next up is LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner. Mahindra & Mahindra managing director Anand Mahindra comes in at a creditable third place.

Dig The Data
Senior Netizens
On Twitter, the 55-64 age bracket is the fastest-growing demographic with 79 per cent growth since 2012. On Facebook, it is the 45-54 age bracket, which has recorded  a 46 per cent rate of growth.

Mobile Push
Some 751 million mobile users access Facebook every month. Mobile-only active users total 189 million. Mobile now generates 30 per cent of its ad revenue, up from 23 per cent at the end of 2012.

Adding Numbers
LinkedIn, which has more than 200 million users, sees two new users joining the social business network every second.

LEADER
Shekhar Kapur
@shekharkapur
Film director, producer & actor
When an artist willingly becomes a ‘Brand’, it is
the end of Art and the embracing of pure commerce. A true artist rejects branding

Marc Benioff
@Benioff
CEO, Salesforce
The best drug I ever
took was philanthropy.
Nothing made me feel
better.  And I highly recommend it

(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 12-08-2013)