Twitter Survey Results – A Closer Look At The Retweet Button

One of the most powerful parts of Twitter and the reasons why stories pass around the service so quickly is because of the Re tweet button. With this in mind we ran a quick social media survey asking people what the thought about the Re tweet button and how they used it. As you’ll see form the results below there are a couple of surprising answers. We ran the survey through our own social media channels (Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin) and asked that people taking part were Twitter users. About 135 people answered each of the questions and I have to say some of the results came as a surprise. What do you think? How do you use the Re tweet button?

Have you ever re tweeted a link without actually looking at the contents of the link?

I had heard a rumor that lots of people were doing this and thought it was worth asking. I think this is interesting because it shows that people are Re tweeting links even they don’t know what the content is so that must mean that they trust the person tweeting and it also goes a long way to explaining why a lot of Retweets doesn’t always mean lots of traffic.

What type of link would you most typically Retweet?

Although there are probably a thousand possible answers to this question and we could probably have had lots of possible answers I just wanted to get a simple feel for the sort of content that people Re tweeted most. I was personally very surprised that news stories was not the run away winner.

Have you ever re tweeted something with your own user name in it?

Have to say this is one of my personal hates on Twitter when I see people Re tweeting themselves or tweets with their own name in it (we get it you are important!!) but looks like I was wrong and that the vast majority of people have done this! Looks like blowing your own trumpet is totally acceptable on Twitter

Have you ever followed somebody as a result of seeing their name in a retweet?

No real surprises here as Re tweets are generally seen as a vote of confidence in a user and the content they are tweeting so natural step I suppose for people to follow them. As I have said in the past finding people on Twitter can be hard but Re tweets and new features do make that easier.

Are you happy with the Re tweet button and how Re tweets from random people you don’t follow can appear in your stream?

I know that I get annoyed when I see random people (or worse still people I don’t have time for) pop in to my stream as a result of getting retweeted by people I follow. Twitter made this change some time ago but it doesn’t seem to bother people too much…

Tags

• questions
• retweets
• RTs
• Social Media
• survey
• tweets
• Twitter