Twitter Is a Drive By Broadcasting Medium
By Anna Johnson on October 11th, 2010Recent research by Sysomos supports the idea that Twitter is largely a ‘drive by broadcasting medium’.
Most Tweets are one-way broadcasts (71 percent) that elicit no response on Twitter (@reply or Retweet), most Twitter ‘conversations’ (85 percent) comprise just one Tweet and one reply, and most such conversations occur within the first hour of the original Tweet being published.
According to Sysomos, which analyzed 1.2 billion Tweets posted over a 2-month period, 29 percent of Tweets generate a Retweet (19.3 percent) or reply (9.7 percent), with 6 percent of all posts on Twitter constituting Retweets.
Most Retweets and replies are made shortly after the original Tweet is posted. Sysomos finds that 92.4 percent of all Retweets are made within the first hour of the original Tweet being posted, with another 1.63 percent of Retweets made in the second hour, and an additional 0.94 percent occurring in the third hour.
Similarly, 96.9 percent of replies occur within the first hour of a Tweet being posted, with another 0.88 percent made in the next hour, and an even smaller proportion thereafter.
How ‘deep’ is the typical conversation on Tweet? According to Sysomos, the majority of Tweets (85 percent) elicit just one reply, 10.7 percent elicit a reply to the first reply and only a tiny percentage – 1.53 percent – of Tweets are ‘three levels deep’ i.e. there is a reply to a Tweet, a reply to the reply, and reply to the reply of reply.
Unfortunately, Sysomos didn’t also analyze the average click-through rate on links posted on Twitter. The click-through rate is another indication of response and engagement that is important to many online marketers, in particular. I suspect (and based on observing our own Twitter statistics) that most links are NOT clicked on, and that of those that are, the Tweet click-through rate is greatest in the first hour before falling off precipitously after that.
What does being a ‘drive by broadcasting medium’ mean? Perhaps nothing more than what many social media marketers – and Twitter users in general – are already grappling with: that the ‘rules of engagement’ (pardon the pun) on Twitter are different to those in other media.
Source: Sysomos Inc., “Replies and Retweets on Twitter,” Sysomos, September 2010
