Buzzgain

Our friend Jeremiah Owyang, digital media influencer and analyst at Forrester posted a blog entry on Retweet and the power of word of mouth. To summarize:

[Information within Microblogging communities like Twitter encourage rapid word of mouth –of both positive and negative content]

In the post he talked about how information spreads quickly with Retweets. Essentially on Twitter if you “RT” or “ReTweet” someone you repeat what they say presumably because you agree or disagree with them OR if you want it to be amplified to your audience of followers on twitter.

Using BuzzGain we tracked usage of the Retweet before and after Nov 23rd. About 16,500 twitter users follow Jeremiah and so his influence in twitter is relatively large.

After Nov 23rd usage of Retweet among the top 50,000 Twitter users has increased by ~7%.

Great you think, Jeremiah well done.

Not exactly. I will chalk this as a not so positive trend. Why?

If you drill down deeper, tweets with negative sentiment (we measure sentiment as positive, negative or undetermined) has 45% more retweets than positive or neutral ones.

This is consistent with the view that bad news travels faster than good. This may also be primarily because of the Mumbai blasts and it could be an anamoly I agree, but you cannot equate a Retweet to someone linking to your blog on a post. How is retweeting different then?

1. Immediacy: Given the real time nature of twitter versus the 3-5 min it takes to blog link to someone, the amount of time to think, process and react to what’s being said is a lot less. If you tweet information that’s not factual or plain incorrect the person retweeting has a lot less time to fact check.

2. Value add: In most blog posts that link back to a post (including ones that just provide a list of links with delicious tags for example) there is a sense of “aggregation” or value add to the post. In most posts with link back there’s a lot more value add in the form of a different opinion or counter example. With Retweets, there’s ZERO value add. Its a plain and simple echo. You can argue there’s value in an echo, but I think its useless for most parts.

3. Reinforces a heard mentality. Retweets are an inaccurate measure of ripple effect. On average less than 0.35% of the top 50,000 twitter users posts are retweets. So it should have a relatively small effect right? No. Unfortunately, even though the next 350,000 followers of the top 50,000 are smart, connected, and influential individuals in their own right, their retweets to posts is close to 0.7%. Think about it. Double the top 50,000. This is a herd mentality pure and simple.

Do I think retweeting is going away. No.

Do I think its a measure of Word of mouth influence. Maybe.

Do I think it complicates the measure of word of mouth online to a point of making it useless. Absoutely.

Image credit: Wikipedia