That's really neat, I'd love to hear more about it. Was this something you were actively trying to find out, or was it poking around until something caught your eye?
A little of both. I was working in social media analytics, and we were collecting everything we could to understand how to communicate the value of this new medium to businesses who could use twitter for marketing. This was still in an era where privacy wasn't at the front of anyone's minds, so there were zero retention policies. Hard to believe that was only 10 years ago.
Eventually, we learned to treat Twitter as a lead generation tool for off-platform activity and apply old school funnel mechanics to it. The next problem became how to build a follower count. Sadly, that problem is what I think led to extremism on the platform. Hence: https://madrox.substack.com/p/yet-another-quitting-twitter
Not op, but at an ecommerce company I worked for we did similar things to track how well our competitors were doing relative to us so could be something like that.
Also collecting data like this can be useful if you want to beat markets.
Eventually, we learned to treat Twitter as a lead generation tool for off-platform activity and apply old school funnel mechanics to it. The next problem became how to build a follower count. Sadly, that problem is what I think led to extremism on the platform. Hence: https://madrox.substack.com/p/yet-another-quitting-twitter