Ever feel like those thousands of followers you’ve got on Twitter couldn’t care less what you tweet? No, it’s not just your imagination. A recent study by Sysomos, a Canadian social-media-analytics company, found that 71% of tweets get absolutely no response. (But what if they’re tweets about God?)
To figure out what kind of conversations were happening on Twitter, Sysomos scanned 1.2 billion messages that were sent in August and September 2009. The company discovered that more than 7 in 10 tweets get no reaction from the tweetosphere and that just 6% get retweeted, and 92% of those retweets occur within the first hour. That means just fewer than 1 in 200 messages get retweeted after an hour has gone by.
Like retweets, 96.9% of replies are posted within an hour of the original tweet. That leaves 23% of messages that get a reply. (What happens when you delete your Twitter account?)
Despite this depressing news, NewsFeed will take its chances and tweet this story, even if no one is listening.
Check out the video of a sample of the 1.2 billion tweets, with their replies and retweets.