Whitetail Deer Hunting Forums are not Dead

Well, depending on the season anyway.

You’d think that with the advent of such great communications tools like Facebook and Twitter, that traditional whitetail deer hunting forums would be long gone. Not so. They are still very relevant and popular, especially amongst the non Web 2.0 outdoor crowd.

So I thought I’d piggyback on my Google and Twitter statistics posts with a little snapshot of what’s happening in deer hunting forums.

In the above graph it shows the percentage of forum posts per month that contain the following keywords:

Red line – Deer hunting

Purple Line – Bow hunting

Green line – Bowhunting

January, in hunting forums, was pretty much a dead time. Most folks have either had their fill of deer hunting from the season or are probably still recuperating from the holiday season. Nevertheless, as clear as a hockey stick, you can see the interest and contribution level for the 3 keywords rise starting in April. The early peak is in June and kind of levels off a bit throughout August. It will be interesting to follow this over the next 4 months to see when the peak activity in deer hunting forums for these terms is.

The chart above shows how many posts included deer hunting, bow hunting and bowhunting over the last 6 months. I was surprised to see “bowhunting” have so little mentions.

So I checked another source to see how those same terms as well as a couple of others performed including “Deer Season” and “Deerhunting” over the last month. “Deer Season” has some pretty good mentions and “deerhunting” on the other hand, does not. That isn’t a surprise as combining the words deer+hunting into one word, is something that mostly happens on Twitter.

Just roll over the lines on the map to see how many mentions were made per day for each term. Click on any point to be taken to that search page with it’s results.

If you haven’t visited a hunting forum lately and have been only spending time on Twitter or Facebook, please allocate some time to seeing what kinds of conversations are happening there today. And for your outdoor bloggers out there, these deer hunting forums are ripe with fodder for blog post ideas. Just saying

To see some of my favorite hunting forums, please go to the Huntography Directory.

* Caution: Slightly geeky stuff below - Lies, damned lies, and statistics!

Last week, I shared some how Google searches for the term deer hunting coincided with the peak of the rut. This week, I’ll dive into some interesting Twitter search trends and activity for deer hunting and other relevant terms.

In the graph above, you can see how many mentions were made on Twitter from 8/8 to 8/13 for the following search terms:

Deer hunting – Over 1,000

Bowhunting- 395

Bow hunting – 359

Deerhunting – 89

The largest number of mentions were for deer hunting. This does not surprise me as it’s the two words people will use the most, in a natural way, when talking about deer hunting on Twitter. There’s also a good chance that the words were not used in tandom but rather, separately throughout the tweet, making the relevance, less powerful.

The above graphic represents the last 50 tweets on twitter for the term “deerhunting”.

Tweet Types:

- 36 regular tweets

- 6 @replies

- 8 retweets

Exposure: 38,259 Impressions

– 13,680 people saw 1 tweet

- 3,847 people saw 2-3 tweets

- 1,345 people saw 4-7 tweets

- 653 saw more than 7 tweets

- I saw them all – *This is not reflected in the chart

The list above shows how many impressions were contributed by these 36 top contributors. Huntography is #4 behind some good company.

On July 24th, there was a spike in twitter mentions for “deerhunting”. I haven’t dug into why it was a popular day, but if you know, please leave a comment below.

This is a tag cloud for the term #deerhunting. All the other words you see are closely related words that have been tweeted between 7/16-8/15.

For fun, I created a tag cloud for my username on Twitter – @huntography.What you see are the people and terms most associated with my Twitter handle.

Top Twitter users by Tweetcount for “Deer Hunting” between 8/10/2011 – 8/15/2011

 

Top Sources of Tweets for “Deer Hunting” between 8/10/2011 – 8/15/2011

As you can see above, the greatest source of tweets during this time came from Twitterfeed.This is a bit alarming since these are automated, prescheduled tweets. They are not manually entered. And as you know, there is quite a bit of twitter spam out there for the top terms many of us non-bots are interested in. These are one way conversations. I prefer to speak with real people and have a meaning conversation rather than just seeing a flurry of automated tweets from people who don’t talk back to you. *NOTE – All Huntography tweets are are manually posted and entered with care. **I do however use 1 plugin that sends my blog posts directly to twitter right after I post. That’s ok, because I’m there to engage right after

Mentions per Social Media Channel for the term “Deer Hunting” between 8/8 -8/14

It basically shows where the most conversations are happening for the term “Deer Hunting” across a variety of channels.Where are you spending your time?

- Twitter – 849

- Facebook – 361

- Flickr - 54

- Youtube – 46

- Friendfeed – 35

- Blogs – 22

Twitter Gender Distribution for the term “Deer Hunting” from 8/9 – 8/15

Twitter Sentiment for “Deer Hunting” from 8/9 – 8/14

43.3% Neutral

42.4% positive

14.2% negative

According to the chart above, you can see that over the last week, the overall tone for conversations on Twitter about the term “deer hunting” have been mostly neutral to positive. This is a good thing. When the general public sees our tweets, the more positive the better. As sportsmen, representing our image is of the utmost importance. Keep it up folks!

For the average deer hunter who’s using Twitter to share what their doing or looking to meet new people, much of this may be overkill. But if you’re like me, being a little geeky isn’t too bad. The thing to remember is that like minded deer hunters are searching for similar things and using similar keywords when they tweet.

Make a list of some of the top deer hunting related keywords. See who’s having conversations there and if what they’re saying is in line with your way of thinking, give them a follow. Say hello. Leave a comment. Join their conversation. You never know who you’re going to meet.

I’m proof that you can meet some really great deer hunters, bowhunters, archers, fishermen, outdoorsmen and people who just plain ol’ love to shoot guns. It’s time to get social!