The story of the travelling tweet (updated, and in English)
I’ll make this update in English, just to make it easier to share with non-Danish speakers.
This morning I decided to conduct a twitter experiment. I was to give a talk on social media for my colleagues and had selected Facebook, Google+ and Twitter as my main foci.
At exactly 8:30 AM I tweeted “Would you be kind to help me live demonstrate how fast and far a tweet can travel in 1 hour? Pls RT! #travelling_tweet # twitter_demo” - but in Danish, as a way of checking how the Danish part of the twittersphere is coming along.
Quickly though the tweet was translated by others into English, Swedish and Norwegian. Initially I noted the number of followers for each of the tweeps who had retweeted, thus counting “potential readings”. I knew there would be overlaps of followers retweeting, hence the initial focus on potential readings of the tweet.
I had not talked to a single tweep about the experiment in advance.
At 8:45 23 people had retweeted it with a potential of 12,882 readings.
At 9:00 45 people people had retweeted it with a potential of 21,009 readings.
At 9:20 +50 people people had retweeted it with a potential of 29,342 readings.
At 9:30 +100 people people had retweeted it with a potential of +43,000 readings.
At 11:00, after the experiment officially ended, it had been retweeted about 200 times and reached a number of potential readings of more than 60,000. In a mere two and a half hours.
As it turns out, favstar.fm has the ability to see the true reach of a retweeted tweet, that is taking into account all the overlaps of tweeps retweeting to the same follower(s).
The actual reach after two and a half hours is 37,387 people. I am utterly blown away by this.
Share this as much as you like (just link to this, ok?) and use it if someone (your colleagues, bosses, friends) are still doubting twitter’s potential.
My very simple tweet went as far as Sweden, Norway, France, New Zealand and Australia but I would very much like to be updated on whether it reached other countries within the 1 hour the experiment lasted (and in any case, actually).
I, with my colleagues, am immensely impressed, and we would like to thank all of you many, many times for your participation.