The Half-Life of a Tweet

TL;DR

This paper investigates the dissemination dynamics of Tweets by analyzing impression counts over time, revealing that the median half-life of a Tweet's impressions is approximately 80 minutes, with most impressions occurring within the first 24 hours.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of measuring Tweet dissemination through impression counts over time and estimates the median half-life of Tweet impressions.

Findings

Peak impressions occur around 72 seconds after posting.

Approximately 95% of Tweets have negligible impressions after 24 hours.

Median half-life of a Tweet's impressions is about 80 minutes.

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.