Impact of the conservation optimism hashtag
The hashtag #conservationoptimism became popular during the recent International Congress for Conservation Biology symposium. Michael Burgass asked me what its twitter impact was, so here is a quick analysis.
Note that I edited this post (24/08/2017) after Michael Burgass asked me why so few tweets. It turns out (and I hadn’t realised) that the twitter API (Application programming interface) will only return tweets up to 2 weeks old. You have to pay to get older ones. So the data in this post is only relevant to the period over the ICCB conference.
Michael also asked about #iamaconservationist, but that has too few tweets so far to make for a meaningful analysis (about 100).
There were not a huge amount of of tweets over ICCB conference, so it is hard to say too much from a broad brush quantitative analysis like this, but here are a few stats.
The first tweet I got was only on 2017-07-26 and until now there have been 813 tweets from 390 users of which 133 are original tweets and the rest RTs.
I think that spike on Wednesday corresponds to EJ Milner-Gulland’s plenary at ICCB.
The distribution of tweets per user is not quite as skewed as other hashtags I have analysed. I guess becaues there are fewer users and it is the sort of hashtag that people only post once to (thought they may RT multiple others).
Most popular tweets
Here is a table of the most popular tweets.
| Handle | Tweet | # retweets |
|---|---|---|
| MorenaMills | .@EJMilnerGulland inspiring action and optimism at #ICCB2017 #conservationoptimism #IAmAConservationist. More info: https://t.co/FrNtVl8U1q https://t.co/jjE9fBeMFw | 49 |
| suewalker2008 | Post Doc opportunity on zebras in Africa! Please share widely 😊 #ICCB2018 #conservationoptimism https://t.co/gyXziTWinq | 34 |
| ICCB2017 | Keep the #conservationoptimism going! Thank you @EJMilnerGulland for a fantastic message of hope! #ICCB2017 #iamaconservationist https://t.co/i4g6Q5S4TB | 20 |
| abigailrdan | Exciting PhD opportunity in Australia for promising marine scientists who want to channel #conservationoptimism @LAFFellows @sfgucsb https://t.co/K9astyMqH4 | 17 |
Most popular terms
The most popular place is Africa (probably because of that job tweet above), the most popular user EJ Milner-Gulland. Other popular words include inspire, great, share, future.
| Term | # of tweets |
|---|---|
| iccb | 398 |
| ejmilnergulland | 256 |
| iamaconservationist | 176 |
| inspir | 98 |
| great | 96 |
| conserv | 89 |
| share | 65 |
| conservoptimism | 62 |
| optim | 60 |
| check | 59 |
| action | 54 |
| opportun | 53 |
| info | 51 |
| time | 51 |
| give | 50 |
| morenamills | 50 |
| plenari | 47 |
| want | 47 |
| watch | 43 |
| stori | 41 |
| work | 40 |
| post | 39 |
| learn | 38 |
| africa | 37 |
| thank | 37 |
| pleas | 36 |
| doc | 35 |
| futur | 35 |
| tcogyxzitwinq | 35 |
| wide | 35 |
That’s all. It would be good to do a full historical analysis, but as I note above you probably have to pay for that.