Comments on: Introducing the ReTweetability Index

By: Is Retweeting Important for your Business? | SIM Mentors

Is Retweeting Important for your Business? | SIM Mentors — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:15:22 +0000

[...] stats by Dan Zarella about the science of the retweet. For example, On Dan Zarrella’s article “Introducing the Retweetability Index,” Dan states that there are 3 major areas where Twitter users can affect the number of ReTweets [...]

By: ReTweetability Index… How Infectious Are Your Tweets? | Too Much News

ReTweetability Index… How Infectious Are Your Tweets? | Too Much News — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:10:39 +0000

[...] More About ReTweetability [...]

By: David Fox

David Fox — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 21:46:16 +0000

Is your index still working? I see all 0's in the retweet column, and most of the people I try to check so far don't seem to have twitter accounts. Is your tool broken, or is it twitter?

By: Social Media and You – Presentation at ProductCamp Boston « THE Solution Marketing Blog

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:50:15 +0000

[...] Dan Zarella – measurement of the retweet. [...]

By: Phil Harper

Phil Harper — Tue, 05 May 2009 13:00:11 +0000

Dan, loving your work on the retweetability metric. This needs to be intergrated into twitter profiles so that twitter moves away from being a popularity contest to being a retweetability contest. At least that way people will try to add value rather than keep us up to date on how their shower went in the morning.

http://blog.fluidcreativity.co.uk/index.php/popularity-vs-value-on-twitter/

By: Jim

Jim — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:28:15 +0000

Another factor to consider is how many people a “follower” is following. The higher that number, the lower the percentage possibility of a retweet due to the higher number of tweets crossing that “followers” screen. There is a higher chance that a possible candidate for a retweet will be missed.
~ Jim [@SEO_Web_Design]

By: @muunkky

@muunkky — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:23:03 +0000

@danzarrella I don’t have anything in mind as it’s hard to see the trends without the data. Firstly I think it is important to have a strong definition of what it means to be retweetable. I’d also second what jon said about filtering out @replies. If you haven’t done this already I think it might level things out quite a bit.

I think you have the best variables already… I can’t think of anything you could add. I’m imagining that due to the very nature of retweeting it must be almost impossible to see accurately past the first generation of tweets. So I would say an important variable would be total instances of terms like “RT @muunkky”.

You are currently measuring the fraction of a tweeter’s flock that retweets a percentage of their tweets. It would be great to try playing with a few indices like “Total number of non-reply tweets that get retweeted”… but again, there’s no reliable way of measuring which tweets are being retweeted.

I think that in order to improve the formula you need a stronger definition of what it is to be retweetable. With that knowledge then maybe different approaches like probability considerations may be more appropriate.

By: jon

jon — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 18:04:10 +0000

Dan, your collection of posts on retweeting is great work — very interesting!

In terms of the retweetability index, I think of it in terms of the contagiousness of a post (relative to the tweeter’s network) and the retweetability-potential of a network. Combining these into a single metric blurs those distinctions.

Also most people don’t intend all their post for retweeting. Looking at my own behavior, there are a lot of updates to friends, comments in Twitter chats, or conversations with individuals and small groups — and nobody else is interested in these. So dividing by the total number of updates the way you do seems to overstate the influence of the Mashables of the world, all of whose posts are intended for broad influence.

> Prior to using the logarithm, the formula over-penalized users with higher than average followers (around 100)

Why do you see this as “over-penalizing” as opposed to accurately reflecting?

> Due to the extremely small result of the formula, I’ve had to multiply it by 10,000,000 to enhance its readability — I would also love feedback on this.

Personally I’d find it more readable if results were typically in the 1-100 (or maybe 1-1000) range.

jon

By: scorpfromhell

scorpfromhell — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:28:17 +0000

Did you try adding 2nd degree followers to the no. of direct followers?

What variations does it show then?

By: Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:57:04 +0000

@muunkky do you have any suggestions as to a better formula?

By: francamenteWeb

francamenteWeb — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:13:21 +0000

GOOD! The idea is excellent.
But in my searches I didn’t find Italian user on list, is it normal?

By: @muunkky

@muunkky — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 16:07:23 +0000

Hi Dan,
I love that you’re taking this problem on and I agree that there is a third variable to retweetability. In order to find the correct relationship you have to define the metric a little more clearly. Right now it appears that you have defined as follows:
Number of ReTweets = (Retweetability)(lnFollowers)(lnTweets).

If you’re having a problem with correlating the data it’s probably dus to the structure of this equation and not simply the operators of the second two terms. You have three independent variables, you may need to try some different types of regression.