What I really like with Twitter is that it’s a great medium to get answers to most questions.
Earlier this week, I asked a quick question to the people who follow me on Twitter – and the general Twitterverse:
I got a few answers to my question, but nothing that could help me get a better understanding of the practice of retweeting.
@mgraca: @karinejoly Any message I want to spread from the Wheaton College account, as well as interesting items from people I follow. #pleaseRT
@davidlmulder: @karinejoly I retweet anything that is particularly useful or interesting that I think people would enjoy #pleaseRT
@sliebler: I RT anything I find insightful, usually interesting blog posts since interesting blog posts are so difficult to find on my own. #pleaseRT
And, then tonight, as I’m doing my usual session of blog reading, I find this gem courtesy of danah boyd: the draft of a descriptive paper about retweeting as a conversational practice written by her, Scott Golder and Gilad Lotan.
The paper – currently under review – is titled “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter” and is available as an 11-page PDF file.
I’ve just finished reading it and thought I’d share some of interesting points found in the analysis of the data sets used for this research – to get you to read it:
About tweets – from a sample of 720,000 retrieved from Jan 26 to June 13, 2009
22% of tweets include a URL (‘http:’)
36% of tweets mention a user in the form ‘@user’;
86% of tweets with @user begin with @user and are presumably a directed @reply
5% of tweets contain a hashtag (#) with 41% of these also containing a URL
About retweets – from a sample of 107,116 retrieved from April 20 to June 13, 2009
52% of retweets contain a URL
18% of retweets contain a hashtag
11% of retweets contain an encapsulated retweet (RT @user1 RT @user2 …message..)
9% of retweets contain an @reply that refers to the person retweeting the post
There’s definitely more to this draft paper, so go read it now!
But, before, why not tell us why and what you retweet by posting a comment?