Type of tweeter
(Table III).
Consumer andcorporate
Consumer tweets
significantly outnumbered any other type of tweeters (Table III). Whilst consumers discuss
how they consume wine, how it fits within their lifestyles and how they feel
about wine, such as “red wine time” (Ref. 926), or “wine: breakfast of
champions” (Ref. 1281), corporate tweets contain substantially different
content. On initial analysis it is evident that business (corporate) tweets are
primarily utilizing Twitter as a “push” communication tool to promote products
rather than engage in dialogue. For example, corporate tweets included “Four
Sauvignons, including Cloudy Bay” (Ref. 1424) and “Specials: Free glass of
house wine when you check-in at Grateful Palate and post your status on
FaceBook Places” (Ref. 1451). Interestingly, institutions concerned with wine
education and not-for-profit wine related activities such as Wine Origins and
Planet Liege structure their tweets as “OpenTable Diners Reveal the Top 50 Wine
Lists in the US – MarketWatch #xxwine” (Ref. 282) or “Wine Word of the Week:
Pupitre” (Ref. 283), “Phoronix Benchmarks From Wine 1.3.21 To Wine 1.3.30: One
of the many organizations that rely upon the Phoronix” (Ref. 1365). The content
used in these tweets give suggestions of credibility. The detailed wine
comments of industry trends and specialised topic knowledge broadcast by these
institutional contributors suggest that they look to be a source of credible
information for followers.
Re-tweets
Re-tweets (those
pre-existing tweets being passed on to a new audience) were demonstrated to be
relatively few in number of different re-tweets but high in number of repeat
passings on. Certain re-tweets proved popular (three or more occurrences) and
were even resurrected over a period of time. Examples included; RT @xxxxlaw:
“Wine Tasting to benefit @CUMentoring Nov 17 4.30-6.30 pm at Wines at the Pines
in SE Urbana”(Ref. 309), RT @majesticwine: “Follow @majesticwine and RT this
tweet to win tickets to @winegang London Wine Fair” (Ref. 670).
This phenomenon of a few
messages repeatedly re-circulating to further extend an audience was a surprise
to the researchers and suggests that though re-tweets may indeed extend amessage to a new audience, the new audience is not limitless.