Some Stats On Retweeting

danah boyd and some colleagues at Microsoft Research have posted a draft paper on her blog (see apophenia: Understanding retweeting on Twitter). Leaving aside some of their more weighty comments, I thought I would post some pf the stats on retweets they collected from at 720K+ sample of public tweets:

• 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 [or ‘mention’]
• 5% of tweets contain a hashtag (#) with 41% of these also containing a URL
• 3% of tweets are likely to be retweets in that they contain ‘RT’, ‘retweet’ or ‘via’ (88% include ‘RT’, 11% include ‘via’ and 5% include ‘retweet’)

I have a feeling that the incidence of RTs would be much higher in some Twitter neighborhoods, namely digerati who use Twitter for information purposes as well as personal communication.

[danah et al don’t mention the use of ‘RE’ but that is a much less popular convention (see A Useful Bit Of Microsyntax: RE)]