29 May Twitter Inspiration: How to Get 622 Retweets and 177 Favorites

So it’s been a while since I’ve blogged here.  Sometimes, one must go on a mental & social vacay.  Blogging is the same way for me.  Look, it’s enough to stay abreast of all the changes in the digital space.  But to regurgitate it all can be simply “information overload”.

In January, however, I had an exciting hypothesis.  I decided to test it throughout the year.  In my post “The Engagement of Social Hope“, I take a wild guess that people like to be inspired and motivated and that old school quotes have a place of human engagement and relevance.  So to get “Science Fair” ready, let’s get “scientific”.

Purpose:  To test Twitter engagement through observation of Retweets and Favorites.

Hypothesis:  Using inspirational and motivational quotes, we believe that tweet engagement will be a decent percentage of whole number of tweets in same time period.  (Part 2 of this series will address this comparison.

Procedure: An average of 1.5 Tweets per day will be dedicated to socially motivational quotes.  We will measure the total number of Tweets, ReTweets, and Favorites.  We will compare the number of ReTweets and Favorites to the comprehensive numbers. To keep constants, we will tweet 1 to 2 Tweets out at 10:15am EST every day.  Test will begin on January 6th, 2013 and as of this writing, we took results up to May 29, 2013. To keep reporting uniform, we will create our own API driven reporting system, which will allow export to Excel for counting of:

• Mentions aka Retweets
• Favorites

Audience will be from one account called:  @blackatlanta which as of today, has 18,698 followers.   Metrics will be obtained via REST API v1.1 (https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1)

Results:  I built a simple API call page that pulled the actual quotes, the date that they were tweeted, and the number of favorites and mentions.  (If you would like to know technical details, leave me a comment below.  ) We pulled the results back to the January 6, 2013 date and SUMmed up the results. Overall, there were 622 Retweets and 177 Favorites.

Example Tweets

5/6/2013:   “A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm. Charles Schwab” (4 Retweets and 2 Favorites)

2/17/2013:  “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. – Bill Cosby”  (8 Retweets and 1 Favorite)

Conclusion:  In part two, we will address how many total Tweets there were during this time frame.  While tweets range on a variety of topics, it may be interested to see what percentage of tweets were retweeted from an inspirational focus vs. “miscellaneous”.

Our initial thoughts were that the New Year in January brings positivity and a renewed zest for improving one’s self.  We can also analyze the data and see from month to month, how the number of Retweets and Mentions decreased, increased, or maintained.

Perhaps, we could also look at Mondays vs. Fridays.  Do more people need motivation on Mondays?  If so, RTs should increase right?  We could also study the core people who are retweeting.  Are random people retweeting more, or a core tribal group of positive thinkers? Based on the data we have, there are multiple insights that we could acquired.

We do however, believe that a total of 195 Tweets being retweeted nearly 3.2x per tweet and almost one Favorite for every Tweet (.91) is a favorable ratio.

What do you think????  Stay tuned for Part 2.