#TradeXpresso Lungo: what is the true value of your #TradeTwitter account?

It’s a long weekend in Brussels, and it's coffee time again. A second #TradeXpresso Lungo, perhaps? The first one , you may remember, involved coffee. This one replaces caffeine with some deeper introspections. No, not those soporific kinds! And no, it’s not a Halloween #tradeXpresso . Although introspection, oh yes, it can get spooky. Let’s make this second #TradeXpresso Lungo more about trade. After all, you can only get a regular #tradeXpresso on #TradeTwitter.

Whether you’re on Twitter or just on LinkedIn, you may have also noticed some intriguing features of our online professional presence. We tend to be on multiple online platforms simultaneously. I am both on Twitter and LinkedIn, for instance. If you are a trade economist or have an academic profile, you might also be on ResearchGate , Academia, IDEAS , etc. Like me, you may write blogs hosted on voxEU or by other think-tanks. And you may have a Google Scholar profile. Or even a Medium account. Yes, I will mention this one too: some of you have very successful newsletters (more or less secret ) or podcasts as well!

Ok, enough with the boring introduction. I don’t want to put you to sleep, especially since this #TradeXpresso Lungo is “decaffeinated”. My point is that our online activities and the professional interactions we generate with it, differ considerably across platforms. And the “digital persona” we build on these professional platforms may differ.

If these "professional avatars" can be different across digital platforms the question is: who are we really, digitally speaking? Take me, for instance. I am not particularly good at introspection, but I think I joined both Twitter and LinkedIn primarily to interact with, and learn from, other international trade experts.

Yet, despite being in a niche market where often we interact with the same people on both platforms, the interactions we have on Twitter and LinkedIn are rather different. These differences can sometimes be subtle, but important. It seems there are some algorithms that try to use the data we generate online on social media to figure out our professional skills and our deeper personality traits. But I promised this is not going to be scary, so let's not go there...

Leaving algorithms and AI aside, I think it’s time to take a moment and try to understand what is the professional value of our social media accounts. What do you really get from Twitter? Or from your LinkedIn account? To find a unifying answer for myself, I decided that this piece is about #TradeTwitter, written in a Medium style, and published on LinkedIn. Bonus: it contains some interesting visualisations, that are probably more introspective than all these 1000 words.

The first thing you need to know, in case you’re interested to generate nice introspective insights about your own “digital persona”, is that you need data. I’ve got plenty when I downloaded everything that I generated on Twitter over the last decade. My Twitter “digital footprint” is not really “big data”. But when you post 8714 tweets (without counting the next one), and when you follow over 1000 other accounts on #TradeTwitter for a decade, there’s lots of potentially insightful data accumulated.

So, in case we are connected on Twitter (not just on LinkedIn), it's time to share with you some of these data-driven introspections about our professional interactions on Twitter. The first question I asked myself was: what do I really say on Twitter? Apart from #TradeXpresso, that is. Yes, you guessed well: there is a lot of talk about Mode 5. I knew that already. I think I might stop one day.

Unsurprisingly, there are also many familiar acronyms: WTO, FTAs, CETA, SMEs, GVCs, LDCs. And Brexit, of course (but look, it is small and in a corner, and I hope it will get smaller when I do this again in 2031). Then there are hashtags (#FTAcomes2town ) and other nerdier topics: public procurement, consumer benefits, technology , new industrial standards , all the way to blockchain . And for me, of course, everything revolves around the EU!

Now, if I do the same visualisation based on the number of citations my co-authors and myself got on our academic writings, the picture is rather different. If you knew me "digitally" only from Twitter you would not know that my academic "alter ego" has FTAs at its core, and is built upon other things beyond Mode 5, like sustainable tourism , corporate governance or varieties of capitalism .

The good news is that apparently I don't have a split personality. I must be an easy case for algorithms. On Twitter or elsewhere I like to focus on things that are trade-related after all. Now, I kept the better part for the end, if you have made it so far, and I want to share with you my "eureka" moment: I think our professional “digital persona” and our online activity is not about these abstract concepts. It’s actually, like so many things in life, about people.

Whether it’s Twitter or LinkedIn, we value the rich interaction with other people sharing our professional interests. Although, frankly, I find it rather amazing that there are over 5000 people out there, most of which I have never met, that are interested in an occasional #tradeXpresso. Anyway, to me at least, Twitter is not about numbers. It is not about the likes or retweets. It is above all about high quality interactions. The quality of new and interesting things one can learn on #TradeTwitter, even if you have more than 20 years of professional experience in the field, is really amazing. And such interactions are facilitated by more personal and direct interactions you have with people.

So, when we switch from concepts to people, here’s the "Facebook of Twitter", i.e. mapping my professional interactions with roughly the top 1000 people I follow on #TradeTwitter. Have a look, since you know what they say: a good visualisation is worth more than 1000 words.

But, wait, before you look: a very big disclaimer before you jump to the wrong conclusion! The size of names you will see below does not measure how often we liked or retweeted our tweets. That would be too superficial. And we agreed we will have some deeper reflections here. So, no need to unfollow me now. Instead, this visualisation tries to measure how often we interacted in terms of things like direct replies, mentioning each other in a tweet, quoting our tweets with sometimes even more interesting remarks than the original tweet (yes, I already said I admire some of you for this skill). There is no perfect, single metric to measure the complex ideas that flow in #TradeTwitter. And it is this flow of ideas we generate from deeper interactions that really matters, not the number of likes.

Now, look at the entire picture, not just your own name. One interesting fact about these 1000 names is that they are correlated with people I follow, not my followers. That makes perfect sense, if you think about it. If Twitter is a source of gathering information, ideas, and inspiration, instead of just another marketing platform, then the true value-added of your Twitter account comes from the insights you get from the people you follow. I am now wondering who else I should perhaps follow or convince to join Twitter, since obviously I know personally many other excellent trade experts than those on Twitter.

Another interesting fact about this interaction mapping is that the Twitter accounts that stand out in terms of richer interactions tend to be from people I met or know personally (including the colleagues behind our @Trade_EU account). There are some institutional accounts among them, but most of these Twitter accounts belong to real people. So, it turns out that online interactions are richer with people that we know for real, beyond the #TradeTwitter metaverse.

Although, it seems the metaverse has its own appeal. Where else than on #TradeTwitter can you have your personal avatar dancing in sync with another well-known trade expert? Who knows, #TradeTwitter might decide to make a move to TikTok one day…