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arXiv · 2302.09654

The Half-Life of a Tweet

Juergen Pfeffer·Daniel Matter·Anahit Sargsyan
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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.

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Juergen Pfeffer, Daniel Matter, Anahit Sargsyan. 2023-02-19. The Half-Life of a Tweet. https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.09654

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