Slashdot Mirror
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.
I guess all the "i showered" "I dressed" "I got in the car" "I drove to work/school" ect... tales of peoples' day just arent *that* exciting
I don't really see why this is a particularly surprising statistic. So most Tweets are only read by users... Most Slashdot stories I don't reply to and only read, does that mean that Slashdot is somehow limited or has a large number of dead stories? Of course not, it's just that most people do lots more reading than writing.
Why are we assuming that tweets are intended to net a response?
In my case, 100% are ignored.
You mean to tell me that the majority of people actually do not care about things like "just went to the bathroom" or "I am on a date right now?" Next you'll be telling me that most blogs receive less than 5 unique visitors per year or that the personal webpage I made when I was 13 was ignored!
Is this really news? I guess the precise number counts as news; I would have placed it somewhere closer to 99%.
Palm trees and 8
Just because nobody replies to the tweet doesn't mean people aren't reading it.
You might as well say that X% of newspaper articles are 'ignored' because they don't generate letters to the Editor about them.
I am NOT expressing any opinion on the subjective usefulness of the average tweet, however.
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
The problem is that it's very difficult to fit what you want to say into 140 characters. Unless you're into text speak, you may find that y
Summation 2
I don't use Twitter as any kind of social network, but when I tweet that "The school is closed to due to snow" I know that it isn't ignored, even if no replies are received. In fact, I do sometimes get replied - via e-mail.
If you are using Twitter to have conversations you are doing it wrong. Back in the dinosaur age if something happened to you(passed a test got herpes whatever) you would actually have to phone/write several people saying the exact same thing. You weren't always looking for a response but just wanted to share the news. Thats what twitter is for. It's not really meant for deep conversations.
Monstar L
29% of tweets aren't ignored. That is an incredibly good hit rate, for what is essentially a write-only, vanity medium. Imagine if that same level of response could be replicated in real life: nearly one-third of the mutterings and grumbles that we hear all the time elicited a response (apart from "Oh, do shut up!") we'd spend all day engaged in pointless and empty conversations with complete strangers.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Twitter isn't designed for discussions, it's designed for announcements. If a weatherman makes an announcement that a tornado is forming north of a city, you wouldn't expect everyone - or anyone for that matter - to call him up and have a discussion about it.
I'd be more than a tad disturbed if I found one of my friends re-tweeting: "Dude, I just took the largest dump in history!"
Since when has twitter ever been primarily about being relevant? It's always been about being real-ish, and for most people, reality is not retweet or reply worthy.
1
(Which is what you inevitably end up with after applying perfect compression that removes at least one bit with each pass).
It can furthermore be stated that for Tweets this achieves near lossless compression.
and how many times does the response go off channel??
ie farm1785: SVR Gandalf ON FIRE
farm1785: HLN ACTIVE PWR Discon rack 45
[45 tweets from service monitors]
none of these would be responded to by Twitter
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Pareto strikes again!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
What percentage of slashdot news posts are ignored? Comments? Sounds like the infamous 71/29 rule.
Actually, a perfect compression algorithm would have the entropy of its input as the lower bound: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
Palm trees and 8
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) even though it's proven to be impossible.
Considering that the original (and to some extent current) "purpose" of Twitter is for posting where you are and what you are doing at the moment (see the slogan, "What are you doing right now?"), most tweets are probably not intended to be replied to anyway. And in the real world, that is also my experience.
Slashdot.