The Half-Life of a Tweet

Abstract

Twitter has started to share an impression count variable as part of the available public metrics for every Tweet collected with Twitter’s APIs. With the information about how often a particular Tweet has been shown to Twitter users at the time of data collection, we can learn important insights about the dissemination process of a Tweet by measuring its impression count repeatedly over time. With our preliminary analysis, we can show that on average the peak of impressions per second is 72 seconds after a Tweet was sent and that after 24 hours, no relevant number of impressions can be observed for ∼95% of all Tweets. Finally, we estimate that the median half-life of a Tweet, i.e. the time it takes before half of all impressions are created, is about 80 minutes.