Dan Zarrella

Using a database of 11.4 million posts published by just over 24,000 of the most liked Facebook pages, dating back to 2010 and earlier, I was able to analyse the performance (in terms of likes) of the four most common post types: Photo, Video, Link, and Status (text only posts) over three and a half years.

My earlier research showing that Photo posts typically receive the most likes was confirmed by this newer, larger study, but I also found a few other interesting trends. Simple text-based posts have been on a decline since early 2012 and the Video type has begun to gain effectiveness since late 2013.

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Selfies are pretty cool, everybody’s posting them. Merriam-Webster just added the word Selfie to the dictionary. The most retweeted tweet ever posted was a selfie from the Oscars.

If you’ve heard the latest novelty dance music hit #SELFIE you’ll recall that the song’s protagonist ponders aloud which filter she should use, X-Pro II or Valencia. After hearing it for the millionth time, it struck me that there is a data-backed answer to that question.

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More new ReTweet data! In the past few weeks, I’ve looked at quotes and hashtags and images.

This time I decided to look at Tweet-length, in characters and it’s relationship to ReTweets. The data set is up to 1.4 million randomly selected Tweets, from 1.2 million different accounts.

I found that Tweets between 100 and 115 characters were 34% more likely to be ReTweeted than Tweets outside of that range, with a 99.9% confidence interval. A big drop off in ReTweet probability occurs once Tweets get beyond about 120 characters, but up to that point, the longer the Tweet, the better.

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Continuing my new research into ReTweeting behavior, I also looked at non-alphanumerical characters and their relationship to new-school, native, ReTweets.

Using a dataset now more than 1.2 million Tweets strong, I found two particularly impactful characters, which when present in Tweets tend to correlate with those Tweets being more likely to be ReTweeted: quotes and hashtags.

Tweets that contain one or more hashtags were 55% more likely to be ReTweeted than Tweets that did not. Thanks to the large dataset, there is a 99.9% confidence interval that Tweets with hashtags get more ReTweets than those without.

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I collected a dataset of more than 400,000 randomly selected Tweets and the number of times each tweet received a “new school” (native) ReTweet. I then compared 4 of the most popular ways to send images to Twitter: Facebook image links (images hosted on Facebook’s CDN, fbcdn-sphotos-h-a.akamaihd.net), Instagram, Twitpic and Twitter’s own, native image uploading service (shown in Tweets as pic.Twitter.com).

Tweets with images uploaded to pic.Twitter.com were nearly twice as likely to be retweeted while the use of Twitpic increased the odds by just over 60%. On the other hand Tweets that used Facebook or Instagram links were less likely to be retweeted. In all four of cases, I found a 99% confidence interval assuring us of the reliability of these results.

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One of my favorite topics to research is ReTweeting. I have several very large (millions and hundreds of millions of rows) datasets that I use to do my analysis. The results of my research with these databases are best practices, generated across many industries, timezones, account types and languages. This data is a great starting point for your experimentation.

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