Social Decay: How Tweets Can Predict The Death Of An App

We used Twitter data to analyze the health of social apps, and find out which ones might be in trouble. Or, as we call it, in social decay.

Carlos Osorio / AP

It's hard to pick winners in the social media business, where new apps with new gimmicks are forever competing for your limited attention. Even highly paid investors are often wrong about which social app will be the next Instagram, Snapchat, or Vine.

But what about picking losers?

Using Twitter data, BuzzFeed News analyzed the health of dozens of social apps to determine which ones might be fading away. To study a particular app, we tracked how the number of tweets linking to the app — for example, this tweet, which links to a live stream on Periscope, or this one linking to a live stream on Meerkat — changed over time.

If the chart showed a steady decline over a number of months, we interpreted that as a warning sign. You might call it social decay.

We started collecting the data after Secret, the app for anonymously sharing updates, shut down this spring. "Social decay" soon predicted the failure of two other social services, Frontback and This Is My Jam — both of which later threw in the towel.

And now we've detected trouble for a couple more.

The first app we tracked was Secret, which launched with lots of buzz in January 2014. Interest grew over the first part of the year, with a big spike in August.

Our chart showed a fairly steady decline after that spike, with a smaller peak in late February of this year. By late April, Secret's co-founder said he would shut the service down.

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