Comments on: The Punctuation of ReTweets

By: How To Write The Perfect Tweet - AllTwitter

How To Write The Perfect Tweet - AllTwitter — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:46:11 +0000

[...] have shown that retweets contain more punctuation than normal tweets, even ignoring the colon that is [...]

By: Guest

Guest — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:17:00 +0000

It’s interesting that your own comment is missing some important punctuation–in more than one place, I might add.

By: Panayiotis Pete Karabetis

Panayiotis Pete Karabetis — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:58:44 +0000

I like hyphens, my good man. Grammar is the devil when you're limited to 140 chars, but what is a guy to do?

Pete | The Tango Notebook

By: Panayiotis Pete Karabetis

Panayiotis Pete Karabetis — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:58:44 +0000

I like hyphens, my good man. Grammar is the devil when you're limited to 140 chars, but what is a guy to do?

Pete | The Tango Notebook

By: mat1982

mat1982 — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 06:15:18 +0000

Punctuation is still important regardless of the number of characters available. It gives an indication of the persons ability to write. I could not in all honesty read something that i know would annoy me due to its “wall of text” characteristics.

By: crucial

crucial — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:53:34 +0000

Thanks. Did not know.

By: danzarrella

danzarrella — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:47:53 +0000

TweetDeck does “RT @username: tweet”

By: crucial

crucial — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:43:47 +0000

Could someone please explain to me the “standard ReTweet format” and perhaps provide an example using the colon. The format I use does not have a colon. Thanks!

By: danzarrella

danzarrella — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:34:02 +0000

The with and without colons graph represents Tweets that have punctuation (including colons) and those that have punctuation (not counting colons). I did this because the standard ReTweet format includes colons by default. I should have been more clear on this so that you didn't misunderstand.

By: Jeff Heuer

Jeff Heuer — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 16:29:21 +0000

Listen, I hate to pick on Dan Zarrella. He seems to be supporting the application of science to social media, something I whole-heartedly support. SCIENCE IS AWESOME, and I whole-heartedly encourage injections of science into the otherwise lame analyses of social media phenomena. Unfortunately, I'm not sure where the “science”, or the “understanding” is in this post, and that absence does a disservice to science, making it LESS AWESOME, and SAD.

Let's unpack the message of this post. I hypothesize that what readers here are most interested in is “how do I maximize the odds of my tweet being retweeted?”. (If I am wrong, please let me know.) The large “punctuation occurence” (misspelling and all) graph seems to be suggesting that a tweet is more likely to be retweeted if it contains a colon. But let's start by looking at the two bars representing “tweets”. Slightly over 85% are “with colons”, and slightly under 85% are “without colons”. How could this be? Either a tweet has a colon, or does not, so the percentage of each should add up to 100%, not roughly 170%. Yes, Excel 2007 makes some nice-looking charts, but what is the point of this chart?

Let's say I would like my tweets to be more retweeted. Does this post help me craft tweets that are, scientifically, more likely to be retweeted? Not that I see. Where is the insight?

By: Tom O'Brien

Tom O'Brien — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:17:49 +0000

Punctuation can of course change the correspondence meaning in subtle ways. In a multicast environment like Twitter, we'll never see as succinct a message as the telegraph between Victor Hugo and his publisher:
Hugo Single Character Telegram: ? (How goes Les Miserables opening)
Single Character Response Publisher: ! (Fantastic)

But it does beg an interesting question when it comes to describing or commenting on the #SaveRetweets campaign.

So Dan:
?

By: danzarrella

danzarrella — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:58:17 +0000

@cheeky_geeky perhaps my lead contained a bit of a straw man, but the data is valuable without that premise.

By: cheeky_geeky

cheeky_geeky — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:55:12 +0000

That's because punctuation is not just “extraneous characters” but rather critical ways of inflecting language. So basically the premise is a strawman. In fact, it could have been predicted that RT's have more punctuation than non-RT's, simply because people have to abbreviate more and things like colons help with that.