We know that most ReTweets contain a link, but there are hundreds of different URL shortening services available to help you save space with that link. I analyzed my database of over 30 million ReTweets and compared them to over 2 million random Tweets to find which shorteners are the most (and least) ReTweetable.
I calculated how much more or less often each URL shortening service appeared in ReTweets than it did in normal Tweets and presented this value as a percentage. For instance, in my data 9.28% more ReTweets than random Tweets used bit.ly. I took into account the fact that ReTweets tend to contain more links than average Tweets and normalized the occurrence values.
The short, post-Twitter shorteners,…
I’ve looked at the 20 words and phrases that tend to get the most ReTweets, but what about the flip-side of that coin? What about the words that are least likely to get your ReTweets?
I used my database of over 30 million ReTweets, and compared it to a sample of over 2 million random Tweets and found the common words that occurred far more often in non-ReTweets. The percentages below represent the relative Un-ReTweetability of the 20 least ReTweetable words.
Some Highlights from the List
There are a number of “-ing” verbs, including “going,” “watching” and “listening,” which reinforces my understanding that answers to the “What are you doing?” question don’t get very many ReTweets.
The presence of…
140 characters doesn’t leave much room for extraneous letters, numbers or symbols, so you might think that punctuation would be sparse in Tweets. But I compared a random sample of over 1 million “normal” Tweets to a sample of over 10 million ReTweets and found that 85.86% of Tweets contain some form of punctuation, and an overwhelming 97.55% of ReTweets do as well.
Of course, the prevailing ReTweet format includes a colon to better display the original Tweet, but even when ignoring this form of punctuation, ReTweets still contain more punctuation than non-ReTweets (93.42% to 83.78%).
I then analyzed the frequency of specific types of punctuation and found that hyphens, periods and colons are the most ReTweetable punctuation, occurring…
I study ReTweets because I believe they offer an unprecedented window into how people spread ideas. And while Twitter may be threatening to mangle them, I think they’re still the most important innovation to come from microblogging yet.
I gave this presentation, or a version of it, at a few conferences this summer and since then I’ve done a bunch more analysis. So I added all my new data to the slideshow, included a video interview with me after Social Media Camp and uploaded it to SlideShare for your viewing pleasure.
If you like this presentation, vote for it on SlideShare and vote for my panel at SXSW.
If you’ve read this blog, you know that ReTweets are one of my favorite topics. For a ton of reasons I think that they’re not only one of the most important developments to come from Twitter, but from social media in general.
How ReTweets Work Now
As you probably know, ReTweets were designed by the community, for the community, and currently look like this:
RT: @username Really Awesome Tweet
Granted, the “RT @username” prefix takes up some space, but that minor annoyance is more than made up for by the benefit users get from a Tweet clearly labeled as being ReTweeted from @username originally. When you see a ReTweet in your timeline it has the avatar of the person…
