Roughly 29% of tweets generate a reaction from other twitter users, such as a reply or retweet, and fully nine in 10 of those reactions occur in the first hour of the original tweet, according to a report by Sysomos.
Nearly one-quarter of tweets (23%) generate a reply (@reply) and just 6% generate a retweet (@RT).
If a tweet is not retweeted within the first hour, it's very likely that it won't be: 92.4% of all retweets occur within the first hour of the original tweet being posted, while an additional 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94% occur in the third hour:
The chart above shows the volume of retweets in the second hour of a tweet being published, and onward. The horizontal axis shows the time in hours from the original tweet and the vertical axis shows the percentage of retweets that occur within a particular hour.
Below, other findings from the Sysomos report, which examined patterns of @replies and retweets.
Similarly, 96.9% of replies occur within the first hour of the original tweet being published, while an additional 0.88% of replies occur in the second hour. After that, reply activity declines dramatically.
Only a few users actually have the ability to engage on Twitter in a significant way. Among the tweets that generate a reply, 84.8% have only one reply while another 10.70% attract a reply to the first reply—that's a two-level deep conversation. Only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are three levels deep:
The chart above shows the percentage of Twitter conversations (on vertical axis) with respect to conversation length (on horizontal axis), measured by the number of subsequent replies.
About the data: Findings are based on the Sysomos analysis of 1.2 billion tweets posted on Twitter from August to September 2010.
