Public Relations & Social Media Insight

Retweeting Without Reading?Yeah, It’s Happening– and It Affects Journalism Strategy on Twitter...

Worth noting for journalists looking to measure engagement on the Twitters: your retweets aren’t necessarily your click-throughs, and the two unfortunately may have almost no correlation either.

Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella analyzed 2.7 million tweets that contained links, and his findings show that the retweets and click-throughs had only a sad Pearson’s correlation coefficient of .038. More vividly (and perhaps this is a stat that’s easier to understand), an entire 16.12 percent of the link-containing tweets Zarrella analyzed generated more retweets than clicks.

Digesting those stats, that means your assumptions are probably right when you notice a weirdly fast retweet, or see a RT of something that you already recognize as not true: Zarrella’s study implies many people tweet a link without even clicking on that link....

[Interesting social media research and Twitter findings ~ Jeff]