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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Not all viral content sharing on Twitter happens in ReTweets, so when I designed my viral Tweeting survey, I included three similar questions: 1) What types of content do you ReTweet? 2) What types of content do you Tweet about? 3) What types of content do you Tweet links to? They’re all pretty similar, but […]
Jokes, despite their popularity and widespread sharing across the Internet, are not a new concept. From a very young age we learn the setup of a joke, and very quickly catch on to the pattern of joke telling: someone shares a joke, I find it funny, and days later retell the joke to a group […]
I spend a lot of time working on ReTweets, mostly because I believe them to be one of the most important developments in modern communications, extending far beyond the Twittersphere. “Ideas shape the course of history.” -John Maynard Keynes Ideas have been spreading from person to person for thousands of years; contagious ideas form the […]
I’ve done a bunch of research into the characteristics of ReTweets in an effort to understand what makes them viral. ReTweets are the first entirely observable and analyzable viral content spreading mechanism in the history of mankind and as such they offer an unparalleled window into what makes humans spread ideas. Over the past few […]
This weekend I was playing with a bunch of different linguistic analysis methods to better understand ReTweets, and while I uncovered a ton of cool new data which I’ll be sharing a little later this week, I also came upon an idea I think is pretty awesome, probably groundbreaking, and definitely worth Twittering about. Communication […]