6% - Pathetic State of Retweets

How often are your tweets being retweeted or responded to? If you're like 71% of your fellow Twitter users, the answer is hardly ever. 

Social media intelligence provider Sysomos recently conducted a study focusing on how tweets are retweeted and responded to, analyzing 1.2 billion tweets to determine the pattern of @ replies and retweets. What Sysomos found was that just 29% of tweets produced a reaction - a reply or a retweet. Of this group of tweets, 19.3% were retweets and the rest replies. This means that of the 1.2 billion tweets Sysomos examined,just 6%, (or 72 million) were retweets.

Other interesting findings from the study include:

- 92.4% of the retweets happen in the first hour, i.e., if a tweet is not retweeted in the first hour, it is very likely that it will not be retweeted.

- 1.63% of retweets happen in the second hour, and 0.94% take place in the third hour.

- Only 1.53% of Twitter conversations are three levels deep - after the original tweet, there is a reply, reply to the reply, and reply to the reply of reply

The primary takeaway might just be to retweet your own tweets to generate more traction.