Great numbers. The time of day and day of week charts for Twitter are interesting in that they seem to mimic the general trends of site visit data: Friday afternoons seem to be when everyone has time to read/watch/tweet/post. The weekends are for other things. With only 20% of companies encouraging employees to use social media at work (PRWeek study http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/Social-Network...) it would be interesting to see where the Tweeting is taking place.
briansolis
· 2 months ago
Thanks Jeff. Interesting feedback...mobile plays a big factor in this as well...
cheeky_geeky
· 2 months ago
I am a little surprised at the time of day numbers. In my experience living in EST, I get the most RT's between about 7-10am, when people are getting ready for work, or just arriving at work. My magic time for "breaking new thing I just wrote) is about 8:30am.
michaelcummings
· 2 months ago
Wow. This is some awesome info Brian. I'll need to read it again when I can really look into it more, but I appreciate you putting info like this out there for us.
briansolis
· 2 months ago
Thanks Michael!
Coach Chris Berg
· 2 months ago
This is AMAZING! Thank you for sharing! GREAT job!
dcjcameron
· 2 months ago
Thanks for sharing such a deep and detailed look at Twitter, Brian. Amazing stuff.
I really like Dan's takeaway from all this... how invaluable it is to have contagious content. The whole notion that content is king still reigns.
And for those of us with hundreds of followers vs. thousands, it's a bit reassuring to know our voice, our ideas, our insights still have a chance of getting through to others beyond our network tentacles. Our primary emphasis remains on producing quality content, on making the substance of our contributions high quality.
Indeed! Hey, btw, did you talk to Gina by any chance?
Donagh Mc Sweeney
· 1 month ago
Very true! If someone says "please RT" I automatically switch off. They also put themselves in danger of being unfollowed if it's persistant self promotion.
tedlsimon
· 2 months ago
Valuable information and data in here that goes beyond speculation or personal opinions/biases. Kudos to Dan Zarella for the science and to you, Brian, for this post.
As for your request: Please RT? In this case, gladly!! And, thanks for leaving room for us followers to add our comments, too! :-)
Rob
· 2 months ago
Great info for us analytical types!!! Thanks for sharing. Mind if I RT? :)
Launch Music Group
· 2 months ago
This is a great article. Nice research and communication. Thanks.
Rachel H.
· 2 months ago
Dan Zarella's analysis about retweets shows how Twitter impacts peoples opinions. Its interesting how "RT" has evolved itself as a citation for credibility. Retweets show how people value others opinions as they forward the information to people they know. I think its interesting how people retweet about relative topics such as news, work, religion and money instead of their own self-interest. This evidence shows how much people are impacted by social networking.
briansolis
· 2 months ago
Indeed...I'd also like to see how many people who RT a link actually read the content before sharing it...
btrandolph
· 2 months ago
I got burned on a few retweets I shared too quickly where the link content wasn't what I thought or even where I didn't agree with it at all! now I make a point of re-ading before I re-tweet...
Green Cathedral
· 2 months ago
Time zone probably plays a role. More than 70% of tweets are from North America. A division in continents or even countries will provide different pictures. For example: South Africans are not retweeters and only 3-4% of South African tweets are read by South Africans. Most responsive words (retweets) for South Africans are 'bokkie', 'hardegat', 'bakgat' and 'gatvol'. In Europe you willl see that relativily most retweeters are based in UK. Etc. etc.
But still: interesting
Bernie Ritchie
· 2 months ago
How genned up are you on the Science of ReTweets?! Check out what @briansolis has to say!
Rose Clark
· 2 months ago
This is a keeper. Retweeting is an integral part of the Twitter experience.
kureng
· 2 months ago
very great analysis of retweet
Kat
· 2 months ago
Excellent blog! I'll definitely RT. :)
Hannah Tighe
· 2 months ago
Wow! Thanks for breaking down all that info, very informative post!
Shai
· 1 month ago
One needs to be very cautious about the data suggesting that "please retweet" and the like get you more re-tweets. It is possible that regular use of "please retweet" could have a negative impact on the number of your followers as well. It's really important to focus on what your goal of a re-tweet would be in advance of strategizing about how to get it retweeted.
In terms of trying to understand Twitter as a terse communications form, I'm really interested in the tweets that get re-tweeted without having links embedded. Those would be the best examples of powerful ideas being expressed within the limited space.
Again re: caution about the research. It might be easier to get re-tweeted via including a link. But your tweets that get re-tweeted without having a link in them might have a bigger impact on developing your Twitter brand.
Terrance
· 1 month ago
Now that's what I call a post Brian, I didn't know Monday and Friday was the best RT days, I thought it was on the weekends when people are off from work, thanks for the testing.
Hannah
· 1 month ago
I found this post interesting. All the different statistics that show what people retweet is significant. I was surprised that self-reference was not one of the highest retweetable emotional and cognitive factors. I would think that when people read a tweet about themselves they would acknowledge the person who tweeted about them by retweeting their statement. I found it interesting that many of the words listed on the “Least retweetable words” list were “boring” or everyday, normal activities such as, work, sleep, bed and tired. The reason for this could be that people retweet things that are new or interesting not things that happen everyday and our just part of a person’s normal routine. Friday was the most retweeted day and the day that people twitted the most on. I was not surprised by this because I would think people would tend to like to tweet about what they are doing on the weekend and people would be more likely to retweet someone’s tweet on Friday because it is most likely something new, and newness content is retweeted more than average, everyday content.
Angela Olsen
· 1 month ago
I appreciated all of the information in this post. I do a lot of RT'ing and have studied for myself which Tweets I'm more likely to RT. I think that the most relevant advice you gave to people who want to attract RT's is to make a Tweet less than 140 characters from the beginning. If I have to think a lot about which of your precious characters to leave out in order to RT, I'm more likely to move on to the next Tweet. There's just too much good information out there to waste my time.
angelinasimon
· 1 month ago
Thanks so much for passing this along Dan. I’ve been looking for concrete Twitter stats and info and this definitely seems like a great lead. Do you happen to know of any sites that deliver stats on clickthrough rates for Facebook and Twitter? I’ve found sites that claim average Twitter clickthroughs to be anywhere from .1%-4%.Managed hosting
MundoClick Web
· 1 month ago
Aprenda como gerar retweets no Twitter
MundoClick Web
· 1 month ago
Aprenda a gerar retweets no seu twitter
gwalter
· 1 month ago
Great post - great numbers - great analysis. Thank you!
Donagh Mc Sweeney
· 1 month ago
Great post. One of the things that caught my attention was the analysis of the URL shortening. In my opinion the only reason that bit.ly is way ahead of the rest is because it has been annointed by Twitter as the default URL shortener and most people don't bother changing it. Tools like TweetDeck also have it as default, so really I don't think it's too valid to say that by using Bit.ly you increase your chances of an RT
Ron aka LANWANMAN
· 1 month ago
I read "The Science of Retweets on Twitter" and really appreciate the useful information I obtained. It is time to tweek those Twitter Centric Marketing campaigns. It will be interesting to see the extent of improvement in retweets. I am certain the ideas in the article will be a big value add to our marketing efforts.
All Comments
I really like Dan's takeaway from all this... how invaluable it is to have contagious content. The whole notion that content is king still reigns.
And for those of us with hundreds of followers vs. thousands, it's a bit reassuring to know our voice, our ideas, our insights still have a chance of getting through to others beyond our network tentacles. Our primary emphasis remains on producing quality content, on making the substance of our contributions high quality.
As for your request: Please RT? In this case, gladly!! And, thanks for leaving room for us followers to add our comments, too! :-)
A division in continents or even countries will provide different pictures.
For example: South Africans are not retweeters and only 3-4% of South African tweets are read by South Africans. Most responsive words (retweets) for South Africans are 'bokkie', 'hardegat', 'bakgat' and 'gatvol'. In Europe you willl see that relativily most retweeters are based in UK. Etc. etc.
But still: interesting
In terms of trying to understand Twitter as a terse communications form, I'm really interested in the tweets that get re-tweeted without having links embedded. Those would be the best examples of powerful ideas being expressed within the limited space.
Again re: caution about the research. It might be easier to get re-tweeted via including a link. But your tweets that get re-tweeted without having a link in them might have a bigger impact on developing your Twitter brand.
Ron aka LANWANMAN, Ocala, Florida USA