BrandSavant

Here’s a stat I’d love to know – what percentage of retweeted links on Twitter are never actually read by the retweeters? So many of the current crop of Twitter influence/trust measuring services place a great deal of weight on the “retweet” – perhaps more than is healthy. Some may factor retweets in as just one component of their algorithm, but then use other third-party Twitter measures (that are also largely based on retweets) as other components, which may actually compound the error. What I don’t know, though, is if any of these services measure the “blind” retweets – those links passed along without being actually read by the retweeter – and if those particular retweets are treated differentially.

The fact is, just as there are multiple reasons why someone might retweet a link, there are equally numerous reasons why someone might retweet a link they didn’t actually click on. Some of these are innocuous enough (they might have already read it, for instance, as Matt Ridings reminded me), while others may be purely sycophantic. Some retweets stem from a genuine trust in the original source; others are simple gamesmanship. That a retweet – especially of unread content – implies influence of some kind is probably axiomatic; however, since the motive for a retweet can’t be parsed by a machine, the degree to which a blind retweet implies trust can’t really be discerned with an acceptable degree of certainty.

So, here is my open question to you, dear readers. Is a retweet of a link I did click on qualitatively or quantitatively different than a retweet of a link I didn’t click on? I’d especially love to hear from anyone in the Twitter grade/level/clout measuring business. I’m open minded about this – convince me in the comments. The floor is yours…

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This report claims it can, and the New York Times ran with it. Once that happened, the Twittersphere started tweeting it (presumably, making Twitter users “happy.”) Anything to this? Well, I’d point out that as of earlier this year, only about 7% of Americans were even on Twitter. The data was also collected from 300 million Twitter messages stretching back to 2006. The first time we ever added Twitter usage to our tracking surveys was in late 2007 – when Twitter usage was essentially a rounding error and not even representative of .1% of Americans. So this data, while colorful and interesting as a snapshot of Twitter, can hardly be billed as representative of the mood of the nation.

Still, I’m not going to beat up what is a fascinating look at the mood of persons who have updated their status on Twitter (which is not the same thing as Twitter users.) Where such a study becomes interesting to a researcher like myself would be if a similar chart could be constructed of the actual “National Mood,” and then compared to this data. If you had both datasets, then you would not only have the true National Mood (you don’t need the Twitter data for that), you would also have a valuable means of calibrating the tendencies of Twitter users by examining where they differ, and where they resemble, the 90+% of Americans who don’t use Twitter. For instance, our last data on Twitter users revealed that they were more optimistic about a U.S. economic recovery – but is that due to their own economic circumstances, or are Twitter users actually generally more optimistic people? For social media researchers, that is pretty valuable stuff.

So, “pulse of the nation,” as the article claims? No, but pulse of Twitter, yes. Comparing the two would be a seriously interesting study, but one I’m in no mood to conduct.

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