Klout, the social influence measuring tool, has analysed a week’s worth of retweet data and unsurprisingly concluded that the lifespan of a tweet is significantly longer for users with higher Klout scores – up to 67 times longer.
Klout measures the lifespan of a tweet as the point at which half of all retweets have occurred before a certain point and half of which have occurred after this – the half-life of a tweet.
For users with a Klout score of between 40-70, half of all retweets occur within 5 minutes of the initial tweet. With a Klout score of between 70-75 a tweet’s half-life is 25 minutes, between 75-80 a tweet’s half-life is 165 minutes, between 80-85 a tweet’s half-life is 315 minutes and a Klout score of between 85-90 will result in a tweet half-life of 335 minutes.
Interestingly, the study finds that with a Klout score of between 0-40, tweets can expect a half-life of 25 minutes, 20 minutes longer than those with a Klout score of between 40-70 and equal to those with a Klout score of between 70-75.
To help put this into perspective, the Klout score of an average Twitter user is 20. Our own Klout score is 48 apparently.
