Twitter Engineers have recently shared some of the trends and insights they've captured with the firehose of data from millions of global users.

Eningeers Jimmy Lin and Gilad Mishne share in their report, "One way to measure the dynamics of a content system is to test how quickly the distribution of terms and phrases appearing in it changes. A recent study we've done does exactly this: looking at terms and phrases in Tweets and in real-time search queries, we see that the most frequent terms in one hour or day tend to be very different from those in the next — significantly more so than in other content on the web. Informally, we call this phenomenon churn."

"What does this mean? News breaks on Twitter, whether local or global, of narrow or broad interest. When news breaks, Twitter users flock to the service to find out what's happening." 

In their report titled "A Study of 'Churn' in Tweets and Real-Time Search Queries" they provide a visualization of seasonal patterns of users across four cities including, New York City, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sao Paulo.

The gradient from red to yellow to white shows the amoung of activity (heavy to light). "This was developed internally to understand why growth patterns in Tweet-production experience seasonal variations."

According to these tweeting patterns, users in Japan tweet more frequently in the evening with users in Sao Paulo going quiet in the afternoon for siesta. So, yes, Twitter is able to determine our sleeping patterns. 

What does this mean for marketers? 

With the ability to track patterns and users' increased usage in warmer months, brands can better target campaigns around certain hours of the day or night, depending on the markets. It's also interesting to compare usage from Sao Paolo to New York City to Tokyo, as it may help give marketers a peek into the significant cultural differences between countries.