Twitter as a potential data source for statistics

An increasing number of people is active on various social media platforms. Here, people voluntarily share information, discuss topics of interest, and contact family and friends. Because the social media platform Twitter is used by a large number of people in the Netherlands and the pubic messages can be relatively easily collected, we investigated the content and usability of Twitter-messages for statistics. This revealed that a considerable amount of the messages collected, around 50%, could potentially be used to provide information on work, politics, spare time activities and events.