Your TPD (Tweets Per Day) And What That Number Says About You

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While personality isn’t quantifiable, let’s use average Tweet-Per-Day (TPD) numbers to create a rough character sketch of your twitter presence.

1 TPD: Joe (from College?)

You remember Joe, right?  He was in that Chem. II lab and rocked a Mohawk for the first two weeks of class and then shaved if off and you never noticed him again.  Still don’t remember?  He was the guy who showed up to your party and sat in a folding chair in the corner talking to your roommate’s cat.  Okay… maybe that wasn’t Joe, but you’re pretty sure that he had the same eyebrows as Joe.  Anyway, his twitter presence is as sparse as his IRL personality.

Typical Tweet: Rhetorical Questions & Recycled Irony

Favorite Celebrity Retweet: Any Of The Guys From Jackass

Prognosis: Just like his Mohawk-less appearance, Joe’s 1 Tweet-Per-Day is utterly forgettable.  In several years you will scroll through the people you are following on Twitter and unfollow him without any hesitation.

2-8 TPD: Cool Mom

Cool Mom drops her son off at middle school. She spends the morning streaming old Real World episodes on the Internet so she can blend in with fellow shoppers at Urban Outfitters in the afternoon.  Cool Mom goes to Starbucks before every Parent-Teacher Association meeting… not for coffee, but for a innocuous cup that conceals her vodka cranberry cocktail. With her son asleep and three more vodka cranberry cocktails roaring in her gut, Cool Mom takes to twitter.

Typical Tweet: Something Mildly Offensive Ending With #DrunkTweet

Favorite Celebrity Retweet: Kathie Lee Gifford or Chelsea Handler

Prognosis: Cool Mom is cool on twitter… for a while. You may even chuckle as you scroll through her feed.  But after a Cinco De Mayo party with her #MomGang she will stay up all night sending out a barrage of embarrassing tweets about the guy she dated in high school… apparently he had a motorcycle.  Cool Mom also really wants you to know that she DID have sex on his motorcycle (more than once).  You wake up the next morning and unfollow Cool Mom, realizing it’s probably better for the both of you to take a break.  You think you might follow her again in a few weeks, but never do.

9-24 TPD: Teen Girl From Jersey

Teen Girl From Jersey doesn’t mean to tweet as often as she does. This semi-rabid tweeter just has a lot of intense emotions and needs an outlet for them… besides, YOLO right?  She gets excited when a traffic light turns red, blasting Ke$ha and using the brief pause from driving to type out a tweet (she can shoot out two tweets if it takes an exceptionally long time for the light to turn green again.)  

Typical Tweet: A 160 Character Rant About Customer Service or Traffic On The Garden State Parkway

Favorite Celebrity Retweet: Ryan Gosling

Prognosis: While Teen Girl From Jersey’s sarcasm and bitchery are always on-point, her mid-summer weight loss spurs an overload of bikini pictures… by August you begin to feel uncomfortable and unfollow her.

25-50 TPD: Z-List Celebrity

The Z-List Celebrity wakes up each morning to an alarm clock blaring the theme song from his sitcom.  Even though he only played a supporting role, he will always refer to the cable series that was canceled after four episodes as, ‘his sitcom.’  When asked to describe the size of his part, he references The Professor on Gilligan’s Island… although; a more truthful analogy would be less Professor and more Shipwrecked Boat. His 300k-twitter followers (a few thousand more than the total viewers for his sitcom) soak up details about his auditions, aspirational quotes and celebrity brunches… because honestly, if you can’t schedule a brunch with other celebrities you are really not famous.  While acting is his passion, fighting to retain twitter followers is the Z-List Celebrity’s new career.

Typical Tweet: References To His Fame, Including: #Exclusive #VIP or #CelebLife

Favorite Celebrity Retweet: The More Famous Co-Stars From That One Sitcom He Was In

Prognosis: Even though he is an over-tweeter, The Z-List Celebrity’s ratio of self-serving tweets to pictures of him with other celebrities is enough to keep you from pressing the unfollow button.  In other words, more pictures with Zac Efron and less rambling about wanting to live outside the spotlight for a day, will keep you following him.

51-100 TPD: President Of A Large Country

While unable confirm that this tweetaholic is actually ruling over a large population of people that depend on her every tweet for life, you decide it’s the only logical cause for such an extreme amount of cyber-sharing.  Remember that time she was eating an apple and a chunk of apple got stuck in her teeth and she couldn’t get the apple out of her teeth for, like, hours?  Well she just tweeted about it so you can always remember.  When The President Of A Large Country isn’t handling a national crisis (“What should I eat for lunch? #Chinese or #Mexican”) she is providing a thorough social commentary on the current state of humanity (“I really hate everyone today. #pplsuck”)

Typical Tweet: Minute-By-Minute Update Of, Literally, Everything

Favorite Celebrity Retweet: Renowned Politicians (or Anyone With More Than 3 Twitter Followers)

Prognosis: You eventually become adept in skimming past her enormous amount of tweets, until one day you notice that President Of A Large Country has not tweeted in six hours.  You begin to panic and consider calling the police… surely only a Taken 2-type situation could keep this girl away from her twitter.  Heart thumping in your chest, you imagine her trapped in the back of a van- fingers habitually tapping away at a phone that isn’t there. When President Of A Large Country returns to twitter to reveal that she was not kidnapped and just dropped her phone into a puddle (#rainsucks) you unfollow her. 

101+ TPD: Aunt Sue

You were really worried about Aunt Sue after local budget cuts caused her to get laid off from the public library.  With twenty years on the job, she was used to constant social interaction.  Two weeks after Aunt Sue lost her job she found Twitter.  Now she only leaves the house to pick up an extra cheese and anchovy pizza from Greasy Carl’s.  On the bright side… Aunt Sue’s twitter addiction caused her to finally upgrade her archaic dial-up Internet service.

Typical Tweet: Live Tweeting A USA Network LAW & ORDER Marathon

Favorite Celebrity Retweet: N/A (Aunt Sue Still Hasn’t Learned How To Retweet)

Prognosis: Even though you groan each time a new tweet from Aunt Sue shows up on your feed, you can’t bring yourself to unfollow her, besides, she may not be stable enough to handle the rejection.