The limits of Twitter

After examining 1.2 billion tweets over a 2-month period, web analytics
company Sysomos has found that 92% of retweets occur in the first hour
and most tweets generate no response at all.

The company discovered that 71% of all tweets don’t get a response. 23% received a reply, but only 6% of those replies were considered worthy of sharing with one’s followers.

The firm also found that if a post is not retweeted in the first hour, it probably won’t be retweeted at all: 92% of retweeting took place in the first hour. (The Media Manager suggests that it is “possible that Twitter streams are so vast that users can’t keep track of what they’re sent, so they don’t dig very far back to look for content to share.”)

Sysomos also found that Twitter conversations aren’t all that deep — less than 2% of conversations reach three layers (original tweet, reply, reply to the reply, and reply to the reply of the reply).