Twitter Interactivity Study

To measure interactivity in Twitter, I counted @’s in tweetstreams. The @ symbol means that message is a retweet, a public reply, or a reference to somebody else on Twitter for all to see. Any message (tweet) with an @ symbol in it is interactive; anything without it is flat and 1-way. By scanning 1,500 tweets on the public timeline across a weeknight, weekend and weekday we can understand how the general public is using Twitter.

The results? For every 5 tweets, only 2 contained an @ symbol. That’s means we’re interacting with others in just 40% of our messages. The other 60% of the tweets are 1-way blasts sent into the Twittersphere.

Metrics on hashtags and links will be discussed in future posts.