Does Anybody Listen To Your Tweets Or Retweets?

Twitter September 30, 2010 4 Comments

This interesting survey landed in our inbox a couple of days ago from sysomosos where they have analyzed 1.2 billion tweets to see if any particular patterns emerge around @ replies and Retweets. This Twitter survery is interesting because it shows that nearly 3 quarters of tweets go pretty much unanswered and I personally didn’t think that number would be so high. Given the large amount of inane conversation on Twitter it is also not surprising to see that a tiny 6% of tweets get retweeted. Some really nice data here and really well presented as well…

Most Retweets Happen in the First Hour

They discovered that 92.4% of all retweets happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published, while an additional 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94% take place in the third hour. This means that if a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is very likely that it will not be retweeted. The graph below shows the fraction of tweets from the second hour onwards – the x-axis shows the time in hours since the original tweet, while the vertical axis shows the fraction of retweets within a particular hour. The 92.4% of all retweets, which happen within the first hour, are not displayed in the chart. 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94% take place in the third hour.

Only 1.53% of Twitter Conversation are Three Levels Deep

Symosos also examined the distance between an original tweet and the replies it attracts. Of all tweets that generated a reply, 85% have only one reply. Another 10.7% attracted a reply to the original reply – the conversation was two levels deep. Only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are three levels deep – after the original tweet, there is a reply, reply to the reply, and reply to the reply of reply. The chart below shows how the fraction of Twitter conversations (on vertical axis) with respect to how long the conversation lasted (on horizontal axis). It shows that only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way.

Nifty Little Twitter Vizulization

The video below shows a sample visualization of tweets and their retweets over time. The spiral represents the time axis. Each blue dot is a tweet, with the size of the blue dot representing the number of retweets and replies to that tweet. Each green line shows a retweet to the original tweet and each orange line shows @reply to the original tweet.

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