My graph is not totally untrue for those of you that play in the space, but I was reading a post by Tom Webster today titled, The Uneasy Relationship between Twitter and Social Media Measurement and I knew exactly where he was going with it. My above graphic doesn’t really completely delve into what the point of his post was, but it does help me highlight two things about social media measurement-one of which he does highlight in his post.

One, there is a lot of useless “social” content to sift through and Two, if the majority of people are not using Twitter and everyone is using Facebook, then why do we make brand assumptions based on a Twitter stream? Here is your answer from Tom’s post:

Most of Facebook’s user data (and, even worse, an indeterminate amount of Facebook’s user data) is not exposed to sites and services that measure sentiment, buzz and influence. So all of the new crop of sites and services that measure these things, from Klout to Crimson Hexagon to Radian6, rely heavily on Twitter, the Internet’s great easy button, as their most easily accessible source of unstructured social media data.

Ok, so again I was having a bit of fun here but I’m curious to hear what some of the social media data aficionados think. Yes there is a lot of unstructured social data out there, and yes a lot of it is bad, and thus I’m wondering; Because we cannot get behind the firewall of Facebook, are we relying on Twitter for a lot of our brand assumptions because it’s giving us the largest unfiltered swath of the social media landscape? If the answer is yes, this troubles me.