Latest study by HP Labs suggests that “The correlation between popularity and influence is weaker than it might be expected. This is a reflection of the fact that for information to propagate in a network, individuals need to forward it to the other members, thus having to actively engage rather than passively read it and cease to act on it.”
That means it’s the retweets that really matter, and if you are a social networking advertiser you might want to find out the retweet rates of your twitter users that you are advertising on. Otherwise, if no one retweets their tweets, you might be wasting your money.
Because the research suggests that there are users with: 1) many followers and low relative infuence, and 2) users with fewer followers but high relative infuence. If you were to choose one of two, you should go for the second type of users. Because that way your message will be heard by a lot more people.
As we know twitter is like a river, at any given time you can only see the latest tweets and everything else is a history… So unless your “message” is retweeted, it’s as good as it’s dead.
I am just rumbling here, but I hope you know what I am getting at. Here is the research:
This puts a serious perspective on twitter, and yet again illustrates the value of having content that offers such value that people would be inclined to retweet it. For me twitter is good in getting your latest pages indexed quickly by twittering a link to the pages as they get created. The search engine spiders follow twitter closely, and will index your new pages in double quick time when you tweet their URL’s.
yes, I saw this study by HP and was intrigued. We kind of knew this already, but HP actually invested in finding this out, which is pretty cool of them. So… get re-tweeting your friends I guess ;)
Very interesting study. Now we learn the real value of retweets compared to just tweets…
These are the subjects that really matters for people that try to have their messages heard by a great number of internet users.
emm..i’m not always retweet..but i know it works sometimes for traffic.
Retweets are great way to gain more traffic. There’s two benefit of these, one time saving and second huge amount of traffic. The search engine spiders follow twitter closely, and will index your new pages in double quick time when you tweet their urls. Thanks for all good info.
The part which was most interesting in my opinion was 5.2 about the influence as a correlate of attention
Traffic that comes from retweet might sometimes be amazing, but it just need some luck there whether or not you get some “twitter leaders” who have 10k+ followers retweet you.
So how to get people to retweet and not just read and passively stop becomes a question to think about.
Interesting read, I only wish they had gathered more targeted information about the demograhpics of the participants. I also wonder how they were able to correct/remove the data generated from individuals who hold multiple accounts. I think that one of the difficulties with studying online behavior would be trying to achieve this level of control. I also would like to know whether or not the sample size had an effect on their results?
Interesting read, I wish they would have had more information about the demographics of their sample. I am also curious as to how people who hold multiple accounts skewed the results. I’m sure there are marketers that have multiple accounts for their individual niches. I wonder how their sample size may have contributed to their results (I know having huge samples can make your end results seem pretty amazing).
One of the problem I am face in my blog is about tweet, I addle just 5 people to retweet post. I wonder how to over come this problem.
retweets are one of the best features of twitter, it allows a conversation to flow nicely
I’ve actually had good luck on ReTweet Fridays having my followers reciprocate my redistribution of their tweets. However, as Cheryl mentioned above, it’s not clear how much traction you really get from this viral marketing attempt.
Tweeting is a good start, but it can just stop to that, while retweeting shows the continuous interest of one’s readers and visitors.
I don’t really understand how to create it but I’ll try. I guess it is good for my blog. Thanks =)