Why “Second Chance” Tweets Matter: After 3 Hours, Few Care About Socially Shared Links
From the post:
There have been various studies suggesting that if someone doesn’t see a tweet or a Facebook post within a few hours, they’ll never see it at all. Now link shortening service Bit.ly is out with another. After three hours, Bit.ly has found, links have sent about all the traffic they’re going to send. So start thinking about doing “second chance” tweets, as I call them.
What I found interesting was the chart comparing the “half-life” of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and direct. Or if you prefer the numbers:
- Twitter: 2.8 hours
- Facebook: 3.2 hours
- YouTube: 7.4 hours
I suspect the true explanation is simply that volume pushes tweets and/or Facebook postings “below the fold” as it were and most people don’t look further than the current screen for content.
That may be an important lesson for topic map interfaces, if at all possible, keep content to a single screen. Just as in the “olden print days,” readers don’t look below the “fold.”
Another aspect that needs investigation is the “stickyness” of your presentation. The long half-life on YouTube is the slower rate of posts but I suspect there is more to it. If the presentation captures your imagination, there is at least some likelihood it will capture the imagination of others.
I suspect that some data sets lend themselves to “sticky” explanations more than others but that is why you need graphic artists (not CS majors), focus groups (not CS majors), professional marketers (not CS majors) to design your interfaces and delivery mechanisms. What “works” for insiders is likely to be the worst candidate for the general public. (Don’t ask me either. I am interested in recursive information structures for annotation of biblical texts. I am not a “good” candidate for user studies.)