Cool chart: Political Twitter is a whole different world

The Republican-leaning data analysis firm Echelon Insights produced a fascinating graphic over the weekend suggesting that the Twitter conversation of political junkies and journalists is completely different than the Twitter conversation in the rest of the nation.

Echelon co-founder Patrick Ruffini explains: "There are a very small percentage of people (on Twitter) who are producing a lot of the political content."

Echelon has built a system to filter out these tweeters -- political campaigns, journalists, activists and such -- and to study the Twitter conversation of the rest of the service's users. Among this group, "yes, there are political things that come up, but they are fewer and further between," says Ruffini. Many of the political stories that trend heavily among Echelon's "Beltway elites" barely register at all in the rest of the Twittersphere.

So while the State of the Union address is a big story in both political Twitter and non-political Twitter, Hillary Clinton's March 10 press conference about her use of a private email system dominated the inside-the-Beltway conversation but wasn't even a blip outside the pundit class. By comparison, look how the Twitter conversation about the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore soared outside the Beltway, far more than it did inside the political bubble.

It's a worthwhile reminder to those of us who toil in the political trenches: Most of America is talking about something else.