

Twitter RT Test Results - riffer
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/05/twitter-rt-test-results.html

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spokey
Gabriel, thanks for writing this up.

I've noticed similar results from Twitter. I've only got about 1/3rd as many
followers as you on my primary account but follower count has been growing
fairly steadily and organically (ie., I haven't been doing mass follows or
contests or anything like that). I've had some worthwhile engagements with
other users but Twitter has been terrible as a traffic generation tool.

It doesn't seem terribly hard to grow follower counts for their own sake, but
I'd love to hear stories about if and how others are successful with Twitter.
(Where success is measured by a metric that has value outside of the Twitter-
verse.)

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zaatar
I RT'ed that original tweet from @duckduckgo but it doesn't show up on the
twitter search page; is that because my tweets are protected? Also, I saw _at
least one_ retweet which was from someone who retweeted because of me ...

All this to say, your stats are likely a bit off ... so take it all with a
pinch of salt :)

~~~
petercooper
_is that because my tweets are protected?_

Yes. Can you imagine the furore if you could find people's protected tweets by
merely doing a search? (I seem to recall, however, that they did accidentally
allow this for a while when they bought the search service from Summize.)

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freejoe76
You can see the clicks on The Denver Post's ( <http://twitter.com/denverpost>
) first twitter advertising push here: <http://dpo.st/ipadsh+>

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petercooper
Always use hashtags with care. While they can sometimes help a tweet make it
into specialized aggregators, overuse or unnecessary usage can make a tweet
look spammy or insincere.

~~~
alexro
And more importantly, the hashtag has to be recognized by your followers as
something beneficial to be associated with.

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alexro
I've launched a website dedicated to tracking responses on twitter. You will
be surprised on the stuff that mostly gets retweeted, so I think your request
was simply not interesting to the many.

My website is <http://topytalk.com>, it has few limitations: displaying only
tweets with at least one reply, and missing about 20-40% of all tweets due to
technical limits.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
I said that in the post, though I'm very interested in what are the common
themes in what does go viral. Can you elaborate?

~~~
alexro
Hard to sum up in a few words, but one scenario is quite noticeable: the most
retweets come from a group sharing similar interests, they basically retweet
just for the sake of making this interest into a trend.

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Can you sum up in a lot of words :) ? Really, I think everyone would find it
quite valuable.

By interested to the trend, do you mean specifically like creating a presence
for a hashtag?

~~~
alexro
Maybe I'll do some sort of analysis later, also I'm working on another twitter
app for the retweets specifically.

For now look at this tweet from God_Damn_Batman (7620 followers):

 _Invented a new drink called The Batman. Ask for vermouth, coffee liqueur &
banana vodka, then crush the bartender's windpipe. So good..._

It got 42 retweets in 1 hour 48 min, and I can be missing another 5-10.

It all boils down to how many of your followers think your tweet will be
welcomed by their followers.

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epi0Bauqu
Anyone used <http://140proof.com/> ? If so, results?

