Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JacobAldridge | Hacker News Reader

Catching someone's eye on Twitter adds to this dilemma. I use TweetDeck, meaning at most I can see 7 tweets in my 'All' field at any time.

Sometimes I scroll down for a while, and sometimes I leave Twitter open and check new tweets as they come in. But following a couple of hundred people means most tweets are part of that magic 7 for less than a minute - that's not a lot of time to catch someone's attention enough for them to click through to an article, reply to your question, even retweet.

Some more stats from Smashing Mag (or another test from someone with a large following) would be useful. Counting hashtags and testing for quality replies misses those who reply without the hashtag, and overlooks other engagement metrics.

Good to see the dilemma highlighted with some data though.

Thank you very much for the very interesting study. The truth is that your findings are actually fairly correct. The problem is, however, that the vast majority of those who reply, do not use the hashtag. They just don't. There are usually more, much more replies that the ones with the hashtag, although relatively speaking it's still not what you probably would expect.

A more accurate average number of replies can be estimated if you consider how many users participate in a poll:

http://twitter.com/#!/smashingmag/status/62126045498839040

This poll was published on a low traffic weekend day which is clearly reflected by the number of participants.

Polls published on weekdays have of coruse a better response ratio:

http://twitter.com/#!/smashingmag/status/55762312174370817

http://twitter.com/#!/smashingmag/status/54897184239398912

http://twitter.com/#!/smashingmag/status/54221240826732544

We never get over 1000 replies to a single tweet, but 300-500 replies is a very reasonable number, especially if it's accumulated over a couple of days.

Just to clarify - it wasn't my study. I was just pointing to some flaws in the conclusion based on methodology, and noting the there was some data only Smashing Mag could provide - thank you so much for doing that!

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