Twitter can be used for many things, apparently also as a “mood meter”.

Cornell University researchers find most people worldwide have the same mood rhythms. They used a text-analysis program to analyze 509 million tweets and measure the “positive affect (enthusiasm, delight, activeness, alertness, etc.) or negative affect (distress, fear, anger, guilt, disgust, etc.) expressed by the text”.

The results showed that people tend to be more positive on weekends and early in the morning. Generally people’s mood slowly gets worse during the day. “Twitter moods and the rhythm of those moods are about the same in among the 2.4 million users in 84 different countries surveyed over a two-year period”.

This could potentially be very interesting information for marketers at companies. This essentially is an alternative way of monitoring. Why not use this information to pick the right time to engage with customers online? You could try to encourage conversation at times when people generally are in a good mood. For wider implications however, one might ask critical questions like “what about all the people who don’t use twitter?”. Can the results of the study be generalized to those people? Furthermore the tool is only analyzing the text in tweets, what about pictures, sound and videos? What role do these elements play? Lastly you may address the issue of the number of tweets during the day. What if you are in a really good mood in the evening, just before you go to bed, but don’t tweet about it?

Click on the picture above to read the article and watch the videos.

Even though the study is very interesting, and exemplifies how the role of social media is evolving, the results are in my opinion not yet ready to be utilized in a business environment without further research.

Maybe in the future, social media can provide information about consumers that we had never imagined.