Great research on the hottest frontier of viral marketing by Dan! If you like his research, you might enjoy this interview with Dan Zarrella on viral marketing that was just published today.
Jonathan
· 9 months ago
Really valuable insights, Dan. Thank you for taking the time to study and elucidate these trends.
Brent Nau
· 9 months ago
Dan,
Thanks for this informative post. Your Retweets by Hour suggest to me as the West Coast comes online we see that spike in Retweet start at 6am PST and tails off around 6pm EST when the East Coast people end their day.
Sid Watal
· 9 months ago
Wow. that is two straight posts about twitter that have been amazing. You guys do more research tan most "real" journalists. I'm awed.
Steve Nelson
· 9 months ago
Yet another informative study - some great info here... keep up the good work! all the best Steve @ SEO Rock'n'Roll
Calli
· 9 months ago
Also noticed the time zone has an effect on the ReTweets that I see. Being based Gmt ( Ireland ) compared to the American zones coming online and picking up trends. Interesting work!
@Calli
Will McCulloch
· 9 months ago
What An interesting article - great information Thanks & best wishes from Hamburg
If anyone wants to retweet interesting, weird, funny stories and promote their Twitter account at the same time, you can do so on my blog. :)
Wendy Piersall
· 9 months ago
I'd also like to share an observation that all Retweets are not created equal. For those users that have a lot of back-and-forth conversations, people's retweets don't always fit the format of "RT/ReTweet: @soandso". It it is obviously more predictable for link retweets, but I'd be curious to know how much data isn't able to be analyzed because of the free for all approach of conversation on Twitter.
Goodmars
· 9 months ago
Wow Dan! Loving the analysis! As a neuroscience student, I think fMRI + twitter can lead to some valuable information =)
I'm also still anxiously waiting for the EEG headset from emotiv to be released.
Patternhead
· 9 months ago
Thanks for the informative post.
Heather
· 9 months ago
Did you look at psychology behind retweeting and number of followers? For example, maybe people don't retweet people with thousands of followers because they assume most people will follow the "big names." Whereas a good tweet by someone with a smaller following may be new to your network.
Tim Aldiss
· 9 months ago
This is the insight we have been waiting for. Despite some of the issues raised above it has become so evident that Twitter must be taken into account as a viable channel for influence and advocacy in marketing circles that statistical data to enrich an engagement metrics framework is long overdue. Nice one Mashable!
Jeff Lazerus
· 9 months ago
Interesting study, but I don't understand a couple of things. What is a "seed" follower? Also, I'm concerned that people will take this as a "scientific" study when it's pretty apparent that there is no control, you haven't tried to disprove the thesis, etc. Is there a plan to do anything more thorough? Basically, you've proven that viral retweets get retweeted. Some commenters have mentioned the "psychology" involved. How can you test for that? Looking forward to more research, thanks!
Luc
· 9 months ago
Good insights in here, indeed. As a suggestion, though, I'd say you could look also into non-event related #hashtags. Recently we got a whole night of discussion regarding the #parperfeito hashtag among brazilian twitterers, and is sprung out of a girl's comment on her own perfect date. what started as a single complaint in a twit later became topic for hours and hours, involving a significant amount of people. I'm quite confident that such occurences have also happened with something invented on the fly by someone outside of brazil as well, at least once.
cheers luc
Kristin
· 9 months ago
Being on the West Coast, I've found that logging into Twitter later in the day leaves my feed full of retweets. I've actually started unfollowing people who just retweet and have personal conversations all day, hoping to cut out the middle man. I'd also be interested in further anaylsis. Keep digging!
jmedvm
· 9 months ago
Dear Dan, interesting analogies...I did neuroscience research a few careers ago,seems retweeting analysis does actually mimic the cellular level approach:once the concentration of ions reach a threshold value then the nerve cell propagating an action potential down it's length towards it's neighbor is an all or nothing response. Your analogy also works in a population analysis of interacting neurons in a network....it just depends if each tweet is an impulse,a cascading event or not . Is it single cell chemistry or a population study? Both seem valid and the subsequent analogies may take you to very different conclusions. Are twiterers like me with my iintimate 106 followers just a smaller network that follow same predictive models as large complicated people with few tweets yet many thousand followers?Maybe herd health analogies may also prove fruitful. Viewing tweets as a virus;how infective,penatratable in a population (public timeline or just own followers). Epidemiology may also help. The analogies really may help? Meanwhile,time of exposure vs numbers of virus particles plays a roll....just some thoughts.
sam
· 9 months ago
Can I just say it is for this article's reason that I find the world of web marketing completely alien at many times. I was going to suggest a gender split in those who find this interesting but then there are female comments above so i cant blame it on that! If people could speak in "normal" speak then there is definately a gap in the market :)
Joseph Curran
· 9 months ago
This is a very interesting and complicated analysis of a complex system... It seems to give us data that is probably very usable to all of us and especially marketers... I for one am still trying wrap my head around all of it and see what it really means for me and how it can help me market myself and build a twitter presence... after all isn't that what most of us are trying to accomplish?? I find it very interesting that "please re-tweet" is all that some need to get a great deal of recognition. There are some interesting questions regarding large followers vs small roller groups, and false followers... a good question from Heather regarding, do people perceive people with large followers as not needing re-tweets??? This would make a heck of a Thesis... Thanks for the great work and analysis.
Tim Chambers
· 9 months ago
Great analysis. Would be even more useful if you linked to the Twitterers' user accounts. I'd like to be able to check out the streams of those who made your list.
Anne Marie
· 9 months ago
Great content! Thanks so much for your time invested in sharing such great info.
Sean Slater
· 9 months ago
Dan, can you condense that to 140 characters for me? :)
Very interesting article. Thanks for the read.
asktonyc
· 9 months ago
Thanks for the terrific explanation of the science of retweets!
LaSandra Brill
· 9 months ago
This is AWESOME! Thanks for taking this time to disect the science of retweeting!
Andy Dawson (Blue Snapper)
· 9 months ago
Dan, great info - thanks for sharing. Some of it will take me a while to digest!
One point you didn't raise regarding 'ReTweetability' is the length of the orginal Tweet.
That is: is there a correlation between Tweets below a certain character count (that allow the addition of 'RT @TwitterName' without busting 140 chars) and its ReTweetability?
I know that I've held off a RT if I have to amend the orginal Tweet to fit the 140 chars.
drnedflanders
· 9 months ago
Greatinsight into Twitter marketing.
Kaña Cuban Coffee
· 9 months ago
Very well studied. Great post.
Lisa
· 9 months ago
So what the biggest (most reaching), fastest tweet/retweet ever?
Michael Harvey
· 9 months ago
This is a very interesting concept. You almost have to ask for the ReTweet to get them.
stephenjoness
· 8 months ago
Thanks for all of the wonderful insights. I work with engineering faculty every day and they would have appreciated this scientific approach.
Replayzero
· 8 months ago
This is simply a brilliant post.
radiocitizen
· 7 months ago
A great article full of useful insights - thanks!
Dr Bruce Hoag
· 6 months ago
A common mistake in statistics is to assume or imply that correlation is synonymous with cause. It is not. Just because two things are related does not mean that one caused the other. Another thing that is unclear is how many people were in the sample and how the sample was gathered. I know it seems as though I'm being unnecessarily picky; but the book, How to Lie with Statistics wasn't written for nothing.
Drover
· 6 months ago
Great article. Just wanted to say thanks and let you know I'm linking back to it from my forum.
brettbum
· 4 months ago
Is there a tool that will tell me my second level follower numbers? eg how many followers my followers have? Think LinkedIn network size
chris justice
· 4 months ago
Fantastic information that makes me want to work harder.
All Comments
Thanks for this informative post. Your Retweets by Hour suggest to me as the West Coast comes online we see that spike in Retweet start at 6am PST and tails off around 6pm EST when the East Coast people end their day.
all the best
Steve @ SEO Rock'n'Roll
@Calli
Thanks & best wishes from Hamburg
Will
http://twitter.com/whatawebsite
Twitter account at the same time, you can do so on my blog. :)
For those users that have a lot of back-and-forth conversations, people's retweets don't always fit the format of "RT/ReTweet: @soandso". It it is obviously more predictable for link retweets, but I'd be curious to know how much data isn't able to be analyzed because of the free for all approach of conversation on Twitter.
http://tr.im/gk8j
http://danzarrella.com/the-neuroscience-of-vira...
I'm also still anxiously waiting for the EEG headset from emotiv to be released.
Recently we got a whole night of discussion regarding the #parperfeito hashtag among brazilian twitterers, and is sprung out of a girl's comment on her own perfect date. what started as a single complaint in a twit later became topic for hours and hours, involving a significant amount of people. I'm quite confident that such occurences have also happened with something invented on the fly by someone outside of brazil as well, at least once.
cheers
luc
marketing completely alien at many times. I was going to suggest a gender split
in those who find this interesting but then there are female comments above
so i cant blame it on that! If people could speak in "normal" speak then there
is definately a gap in the market :)
Very interesting article. Thanks for the read.
digest!
One point you didn't raise regarding 'ReTweetability' is the length of the
orginal Tweet.
That is: is there a correlation between Tweets below a certain character
count (that allow the addition of 'RT @TwitterName' without busting 140 chars)
and its ReTweetability?
I know that I've held off a RT if I have to amend the orginal Tweet to fit
the 140 chars.