Of 1.2 Billion Twitter Posts, 71% Are Ignored

destinyland writes "1.2 billion Twitter 'tweets' were analyzed over two months by analytics company Sysomos, who concluded that a whopping 71% of them got no reaction whatsoever — no online responses, and no Twitter 'retweets.' 'Only a small number of users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way,' the researchers conclude, noting that just 6% of Twitter's status updates ever get retweeted (while 23% get a reply). And among those status updates, 85% have exactly one response, while only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are more than three levels deep — where a reply receives a response which then generates a second reply." I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.

Re:aww...

[c0mpliant]

Its usually a good indication that they are ignored or virtually ignored. Perhaps they are read but they would be discarded as quickly as they are read, without any further discussion, comment or "nod of the head" as W B Yeats would say.

As this comment will probably be.

Re:Not the point

[Captain Hook]

tweeting isn't talking, it's a short/timely update of whats you are doing. Now you can question if thats is useful or not, and I'm not going to get into that arguement, but the idea that tweets are about 2 way communication just doesn't fit with what the service seems to be offering.

Approaching 80-20

[srussia]

Pareto [wikipedia.org] strikes again!

Re:Simple, just use perfect compression recursivel

[betterunixthanunix]

Actually, a perfect compression algorithm would have the entropy of its input as the lower bound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) [wikipedia.org]

Re:aww...

[tomhudson]

just because something didn't get an answer, doesn't mean it was "ignored"..

The true stats are worse ... as I'll explain below:

I am astounded by the claim that nearly three out of ten tweets actually do get any response.

I'm not. "Social marketers" buy twitter accounts in bulk - ten cents apiece.

Many of the "responses" are from one "bought" account to another to try to generate "buzz" - the true level is probably in the single digits.

Re:Simple, just use perfect compression recursivel

[thijsh]

You take it too seriously... I'm talking about the "perfect compression" that is up there with the "perpetuum mobile"... Every once in a while there is someone that absolutely believes they've found it (like this hit from Google [wired.com]) even though it's proven to be impossible.

Re:aww...

[Just Some Guy]

There are a lot of others, too. I follow quite a few software authors to hear about problems they've found or new releases. "Found a glitch when posting to Reddit" or "Apple just approved version 2.4.1!" don't deserve replies.

I never retweet famous people or software authors. I figure that if you wanted to hear Conan O'Brien's latest quip, you'd follow him. If you don't own a copy of OmniFocus, then you won't care about a new version. While I don't ignore those tweets, I have no incentive to pass them along so I don't.

TFA does not say 'ignored'

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to point out that the word 'ignored' does not appear anywhere in TFA. By saying that 71% are ignored, whoever it was that wrote the headline for this submission has drawn their own, very clearly non-provable, conclusion from the data contained in TFA.