What's the Half-Life of Your Tweet?

What happens to a tweet if it's posted and no one reads it?  Was it really posted?

I often wonder about this, as I launch what I consider to be the most profound tweet in the twitterverse -- only to be rewarded with -- crickets.  No response.  Did it go unnoticed?  Was it not profound enough to catch anyone's interest?  Chances are, it simply got lost in the stream of thousands of tweets that stream by every minute.

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.

Bit.ly has measured what it calls the “half-life” of a socially-shared link. By half-life, it means the point in which a link has received half the clicks it will ever get. From the company’s blog post:

We can evaluate the persistence of the link by calculating what we’re calling the half life: the amount of time at which this link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak.

In short, after three hours, links shared on the two major social networks — Twitter and Facebook — are headed to obscurity. However, YouTube links last a bit longer. It’s unclear what Bit.ly means here, but I think it’s saying that a YouTube link that’s shared on Twitter or Facebook will attract attention longer than other types of links shared on them. I’m checking on this.

There is a great post on this stuff here.