Interesting look at a study on the success of Tweets and Re-Tweets by Greg Beaubien at PRSA. Althought Re-Tweet rates may be low for some, getting the initial message to the target market that you locate is important - communicate and remain social.
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The overwhelming majority of Twitter messages fall on deaf ears, new research finds.
As reported by Mashable, Sysomos, which makes tools to analyze social media, looked at 1.2 billion tweets over a two-month period and found that 71 percent of them produced no replies or re-tweets.
Re-tweets — when the recipient of a Twitter message forwards it to his or her own followers on the micro-blogging service — are especially rare, with only 6 percent of all tweets being redistributed, according to the research.
This might be good news for Twitter users who feel like outcasts because they’re seldom re-tweeted; as it turns out, the experience is typical. But when a re-tweet does happen, it’s usually in the first hour after the initial tweet was published.
Once those 60 minutes have passed, reactions are nearly impossible to come by, the Sysomos research found. And when a Twitter message produces a reply, it’s usually only a single reply, rather than the beginning of a back-and-forth conversation.
The research looked at Twitter replies and re-tweets in aggregate, which means that the percentages will fluctuate based on an individual Twitter user’s number of followers and overall influence.
