How Very Short Half-Life Span of Post on Twitter Platform Dictates Unique Ideas to Tweet Same Content W/O Being Spammy

The Half-life of Twitter Post Determines Your Social Half-life

Do you know the half-life of your post on Twitter? Twitter moves the fastest of all the social networks. The half-life of a post on Twitter is a great example of determining your own social half-life.

The social platform is indispensable for many experts, thought leaders, trendsetters, and incredible influencers. The half-life of their posts on Twitter stand out.

Twitter is one of the most competitive (if not the most) and probably the most cutthroat platform where your posts disappear the fastest, what a short half-life of  post on Twitter platform?

This post may contain affiliate links. It means we may receive a small commission, at no cost to you, if you make a purchase.

What is half-life of a post on Twitter?

According to Wikipedia, this is the definition of half-life.

The amount of time required for the amount of something to fall to half its initial value is Half-life (t1⁄2).

Half-life: commonly used in nuclear physics.

It describes how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay. In general, half-life discusses any type of exponential decay.

– Wikipedia

Tweeting in the Undeniable Short Life of a Post

Now to more data-proven insight on the half-life of a post on Twitter.

The Twitter platform is a high-volume low-value traffic source. Why? Because the largest number of impressions and interactions your tweet get are in the first half-hour or so.

Wiselytics studied a million tweets (that had at least 10 retweets each) to find how engagement declines over time. They found that the average half-life of a tweet (its median lifespan) is 24 minutes.

The SEO consulting company Moz found in its research that the number is around 18 minutes.

In other words, a tweet gets half its interactions in the first half-hour. It then then starts a long, slow decline into the fog of time.

The half-life – the amount of time at which a link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak – for each social network’s post was:

Twitter’s mean half-life of a link is 2.8 hours

Facebook’s mean half-life is 3.2 hours

For ‘direct’ sources (like email or IM clients) it’s 3.4 hours

Youtube links have a mean half-life of 7.4 hours

– A study on link clicks

Twitter User-X on Half-life

Few guides have upward limits on the number of times a brand ought to tweet in a day.

• Some Twitter profiles post a lot on twitter every day. They leverage this short half-life of a post on the platform.  You really can get away with it there!
• You may also see people posting the same tweet to their Twitter feed at different times of the day.

A tweet’s life span’s tightly correlated to the size of an account’s following. See the data metrics when this profile on Twitter had less than 3000 followers.

How long do you leave a tweet pinned up on the top of your page? The longer it is, the longer your followers will have an opportunity to engage with it. Give your followers some time to check your pinned tweet. Consequently, react to your it before piling another one on top of it.

Comparison of a Tweet, Instagram Post, Facebook Post, and Pinterest Pin

1. Instagram Post

The half-life of an Instagram post is about 19 hours.

It takes 72 minutes for an Instagram post to gather half of its total engagement. But that doesn’t mean a post is useless after 19 hours.

Posts continue to get engagement for days afterward, just at a slower clip.

A post by a top brand receives 50% of comments within the first six hours and 75% within 48 hours.

Enter High-performing posts on Instagram . They have double the average engagement and see a peak later. It takes more than 13 hours to reach 50% of comments.

High-quality content has a longer lifespan on Instagram.

2. Facebook Post

The half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes.

• The half-life of a tweet is 4 times shorter than a Facebook post.
• A  Facebook post reaches 75% of its potential engagement in 5 hours.
• A median Tweet reaches this 75% mark in less than 3hrs.
• A typical tweet reached half the value of its total engagement within the first 16 minutes after posting.

What’s the takeaway here?

Remember, after about 2 hours, your Facebook posts disappear from the News Feed. Never to be seen by your loyal fans again. So make sure those 2 hours happen at the right time!

A Point of Concern with Facebook

For obvious reasons, social platforms rarely reveal the secrets surrounding their algorithm. However, as of September, 2021, a revelation surfaced to the public. The expose of an overhaul of Facebook’s algorithm in 2018 altering newsfeed and trending content.

… major overhauls to the platform, changing things that were central to what made Facebook, Facebook. One area that researchers tried to target … the platforms speed and how easy it was for information to spread quickly.

WSJ’s Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz. The investigative series based on an extensive array of internal Facebook documents (The Facebook Files, Part 4: The Outrage Algorithm)

Listen to this episode of the podcast here: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/the-facebook-files-part-4-the-outrage-algorithm/E619FBB7-43B0-485B-877F-18A98FFA773F

Buzzfeed experience

“Look, we do all this great stuff about animals and self care that’s high quality … should be going viral, but it’s not. Instead what’s going viral … posts like this one post … 21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying, … racked up 13,000 reshares and 16,000 comments on Facebook.”

– Jonah Peretti, the CEO of Buzzfeed (Oct0ber, 2018)

In the podcast, Keach Hagey of WSJ adds:

… it went completely viral … people just yelling at each other in the comments about race … yelling at Buzzfeed for having written it in the first place … angry comment frenzy that propelled the virality.

3. Pinterest Pin

Pinterest’s average life of a Pinterest post is 4 months.

“The half-life of a Pinterest pin is 1,680 times longer than a Facebook post.”

• When people visit Pinterest, they browse, they search, they surf, and they uncover more pins.
• Researching a bit further seemed to back up these numbers, with some debate on Pinterest. A year later, a  pin is getting 1000s of repins.
• Pinterest pins are accompanied by a lot of metadata. Make the most of this long life by creating evergreen pins with beautiful images and well-written descriptions.
• Share your content with your audience and find quality content that you can pop in and schedule instantly for an entire week or month.

If you spend time picking out the perfectly shareable pin, that effort won’t disappear within minutes.

Major algorithm change

Each social platform has made drastic changes to their algorithms, and continues to do so. Insider threats (whistleblower) have exposed some drastic changes. This is the most recent scenario in the case of Facebook.

But Pinterest users can attest to Pinterest publicly sharing their massive algorithm overhauls. Whether they share everything or not is beyond this blog post.

With each algorithm alteration, comes an expose, and the Twitter platform has had its share of biases.

What am I trying to stay?

All these ‘how algorithm woks today,’ ‘how algorithm changes,’ ‘ algorithm facts you need to know,’ confirm the following. What you think is the horrendous half-life of a post on Twitter may not be what it is today. Nevertheless, we learn how to lengthen the exposure of our content because social value it the CV of today.

Food for Thought?

Selling on Twitter vs Pinterest vs Facebook

No doubt Smart social media users have leveraged Twitter and Facebook platforms to make sales.

Pinterest beats the horribly short half-life of a post on Twitter by 1600 times more. Right? If you are a smart investor, where would you invest? Shouldn’t you invest in Pinterest strategies?

Pinterest’s user base is a major “buying” audience. Pinterest has stated that:

92% of their users use Pinterest to plan for purchases
Over 50% of users have bought something they’ve seen on Pinterest

The opportunity for leveraging the platform to promote products is huge. You earn extra money from Pinterest affiliate marketing. Thereby, you earn a passive income – what a win win?

Acquire wealth accumulating advice from Dale Persons of Blogging Her Way. She’s a Pinterest guru with a bank of experience in matters Pinterest and earning passive income. Grasp the Pinterest algorithm cycle.

See the leaps and bounds from her neat and tidy book: Get Paid to Pin: How to Make Money on Pinterest.

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Extend the Half-life of a Post on Twitter

The equation for Twitter success is simple: More tweets = higher engagement.

Tweets can have an extended old age due to retweets and a couple of people continually zapping the tweet back to life through comments, reposting, and re-sharing the post.

When you tweet (the time you actually push the tweet button on Twitter) or ide your scheduling too, therefore, is critical and important. 

Join the formerly Monday and Thursday blog share team now Monday Blog Club and Thursday Blog Club on Twitter. Send a direct message with your latest blog post to be included. All spam is blocked.

Instructions of blog sharing

Retweet yourself like no one’s watching.

In our case, Monday and Thursday Blog Share is a day to share content to a relevant audience. The pioneer team is cut accross diverse fields though interrelated. The uniting factor simple: Every business, person, startup, mom working from home, stay at home dad, or employee wants to make more money today, than they made yesterday. If non-profits want to be self sufficient.

Tweet frequently and include relevant hashtags

How do you increase retweets from other parties. Currently, we use two generic hashtags #mondayblogshare #thursdayblogshare plus one hashtag that identifies the blogger, writer or content creator like #thextraordinarionly. A universal hashtag will be shared shortly.

Tweets with links increase half-life of post and are 86% more likely to be retweeted 

Like photos, links appeal to Twitter users. Links, however, are more likely to increase your number of retweets than engagement rates. Give people something valuable to pass on to their followers beyond your commentary on the link.

Retweet your followers and other people’s content too

At the monday and thursday blog club, the instructions are to reply to a tweet with a blog post link (NOT link to a prodcut, service or program)

Post at the optimal time

The best time to tweet is when your audience is online. On any given day, the best time to tweet is about 5 pm, when about 6% of all re-tweets are made, but on mid-week or on weekends, post or schedule your tweets to post at noon or 5-6 pm.

For Business to Business (B2B) marketing, weekdays (Monday to Friday) are 15-20% better for meaningful engagement. Most retweets take place at 5 pm and the best click-through rate is seen at 6 pm (best CTR) tweets. This is the time the ‘5 to 7’ crowd includes the majority of motivated entrepreneurs looking to catch up on trending topics and the latest news.

Post multiple times

If less than 10% of your fans see any given post, the odds of them seeing it more than once are very unlikely.

So how often should you post on Twitter?

Your chance of getting more unique views and backlinks increases as you increase the frequency that you share content. Content updates are vital when trying to drive traffic to your site. A  study done last summer by Kissmetrics indicates that the best tweeting frequency optimal for click-through is one to four tweets per hour.

By their own admission, Buffer tweets 14 times per day but never more than once per hour. They suggest that you can tweet as many as 30 times per day.

Post repurposed content

The most difficult type of engagement to earn is a share. With a share, a Twitter user indicates that they enjoy the post, and they are willing to be associated with it. They’re okay with their friends on Twitter seeing that they’ve shared the piece. Hence, you can present your content, blog post, or video to your audience with different titles, questions, images, quotes or other messages. The same blog post has several different ways of presenting it.

Engage to increase your post’s half-life

If you never respond to comments or likes left on your posts, why should people continue to leave comments or like your posts? It sounds simple. To help extend the lifespan of your posts, do not thank your fans and followers only. Keep conversations going, pose more questions, and seek alternative opinions.

When mixing up blog posts and other pieces of content, we would tweet 15-20 times (even more) on Twitter especially on weekends. The resultant effect was the engagement and reach as shown below with over 8000 followers.

Schedule your content

When ghostwriting, the buck of scheduling content stops with the owner of an article or blog.

Our content scheduling strategy comprises of the virgin, evergreen or repurposed content.  TweetDeck’s host of advanced features helps us to test other content scheduling apps and get the most of Twitter when managing multiple Twitter accounts, scheduling Tweets for posting in the future, and building Tweet collections.

7 Unique Ideas to Extend the Very Short Life of a Tweet: Interesting Ways to Share the Same Content on Twitter Without Appearing Spammy

It is a fact.

Social media is one of the most popular free marketing tools around. It plays a role in driving traffic to your website, business, program, service, and products.

Using Twitter to promote your content, landing pages, squeeze pages, blog posts and other useful pages on your website especially when most of your users are engaged with it is very important.

These 7 uniques ideas have seen us extend the life of a tweet when sharing the same content over and over again without being spammy.

Even news sites have adopted ‘tweeting’ strategies for the results for breaking news or here is no ’secret sauce’ for digital publishers looking to improve their success on Twitter,

You will find more infographics at Statista

Some accounts post three to thirty tweets a day and others with very large followings tweet one-hundred times!

Tweeting Tweaks for Engagement

1. Run a poll based on your content details: When running a poll on Twitter, you will see better results when you collaborate with your loyal fans and remind them to participate in the poll.
2. Use different images with the same content link: Some links may not require different images with each tweet. Mixing it up though gives your content a fresh lease of life.
3. Pose an interesting question that is answered by your content: When you pose a question that is answered by your content, you are saliently directing your audience to read further or dig more into your content. This is one way you can pass along passwords to opt-in to Freebies for your exclusive members.
4. Post an interesting piece of data or a statistic that is in your content: Facts that are well displayed in graphs, pie charts or infographics could be shared with a ‘did you know’ kind of tweet. The human brain is fascinated by data.

Which tweeting strategy works for you successfully?

• Post the title of your blog post as a new tweet with a link to that content: Your attention-grabbing blog post title will get more clicks and shares even when shared alone with the link to your content. 99% of the time, Twitter pulls the thumbnail to your featured image. If it does not exist it, create one and add it to the new tweet.
• @mention an influencer or multiple of them and add your blog post link: this works best if the said influencer is mentioned in your content, or had provided you with a quote to add to your content. At times, even send them an email that reads ‘share this with your followers’. You will be surprised where help to share your content on Twitter comes from. Remember to show your appreciation when they do so.
• Repeat the same exact tweet at a very different time of day to reach a different segment of your audience: Fist of all, all Twitter users – and any other social media platform users – are online at different time zones. There are a few Twitter accounts managed by Virtual Assistants that have a person online 24/7 – but this does not mean that you can not share the very same tweet at a different time. If you research online, some Twitter accounts have had success with sharing the same tweet post up to 44 times in a day. (Ouch!)

Each business had different experiences.

That does not mean that you can not implement social media share buttons in your blog posts. This further makes your task easy by allowing your readers to share your content on different social media networks if they like your post.

Do Not Be Discouraged If You Do Not See Results Instantly

Loyal Audience helps prolong half-life of a post on Twitter

A study has been conducted that states that no matter what you do, fifty percent of your prospects, followers, and fans do not bother at all with your content, products, services or programs.  Of the remaining fifty percent, you get instant attention from only seven and a half percent with the right speaking skills, copy, and selling.

What does that mean?

The moment you click publish, or share of any of your content, landing pages, squeeze pages, videos, posts, products, services or program, only 7.5% of the remaining fifty percent that cares are your raving fans. This is the psychology behind having a large following, fans, and people that root for you.

It is what leads to the growth of large following on any platform, whether Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin or Youtube.

The remaining 42.5 percent will take some form of action within 18 to 180 days.

Can You Prolong Virality on Twitter?

That is when they will come to:

1. Retweet your tweet
2. Respond to your ask
3. Comment on your blog post
4. Share your content
5. Make a purchase of your program, service or product

The lesson from this study is to just keep at it with guts, grit, grace, and gumption.

• Keep sharing your content.
• Spruce up your squeeze pages.
• Keep polishing your book on Amazon.
• Do not give up.
• Be consistent.

Are Twitter’s New Features Blessings in Disguise? Never in Favor of the Half-life of Post on Twitter?

 1. Limit to Who can See and Reply to your Tweets

Twitter will, in the near future (who does not love that phrase?) introduce a feature that will limit who can see and reply to your tweets. As this change rolls in, you have to learn new ways to extend the life of your tweets.

The new options include:

• Global – Anyone can reply to your tweet
• Group – Only people you follow or mention would be able to reply
• Panel – Only people you directly mention within the tweet text itself would be able to reply
• Statement – No tweet replies would be allowed at all

According to Social Media Today, here’s some additional information:

With this update, if you were to limit the respondents to only those who were tagged in the discussion, Twitter would be able to facilitate interview-style discussions, which could be great for hosting live chats, or even major celebrity interviews, which are often flooded with spam on dedicated hashtags.

Get ready for this new capability which would enable users to restrict the audiences of their tweets. and tone down on secondary noise as Twitter’s head of product Kayvon Beykpour notes.

What’s your take on this new feature that Twitter promises to begin testing on the audience restriction options in the first quarter of 2020?

2. Fleet Tweets

Twitter is now testing a new feature called “Fleets”. The ephemeral tweets (Fleets) are deleted after 24 hours. The announcement was made by Kayvon Beykpour, Product Lead of Twitter. The test is only in Brazil.

Fleets are a way to share fleeting thoughts. Unlike Tweets, Fleets disappear after 24 hours and don’t get Retweets, Likes, or public replies– people can only react to your Fleets with DMs. Instead of showing up in people’s timelines, Fleets are viewed by tapping on your avatar. pic.twitter.com/sWwsExRLcJ

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) March 4, 2020

The company says the ephemeral tweets, are designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets.

Feature of a Fleet

• You cannot like a fleet
• It can’t be retweeted
• You respond to a fleet with a reaction emoji
• When you respond with text, it will open up a direct message (DM)

Note that last month, Twitter bought Chroma Labs, a seven-person startup founded by former Facebook and Instagram employees that make a tool for creating ephemeral stories.

Twitter favors the half-life of a popular post

Twitter algorithm-based timeline ranks popular tweets higher than recent tweets. Thus the half-life of a post on Twitter is just like the ephemeral stories – really short.

Competing brands including Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp use a similar approach.

Instead of a typical link on Twitter seeing half of its total engagement in less than three hours, the half-life of a popular post that generates engagement is extended. It now ranks higher in timelines.

Be creative and devise posts around trending topics that are relevant to your bran. Get your content bumped to the top of the timeline. Push that half-life of a post on Twitter with trending topics. They generate more exposure on the Twitter platform.

Previously, tweets were ranked in chronological order.

Now, tweets rank based on engagement on a post.

Test

You would rather spend more time developing a quality post that interests and benefits your followers and target audience. The more your post is favored and clicked on, the longer it will stay in plain view in user timelines. This is applicable everywhere on Twitter.

To maximize your social media marketing for extreme engagement, exposure, and sales extend your content sharing strategy to include Pinterest. Optimize content for site performance and SEO and invest time to include beautiful shareable images for Pinterest.

Update on Twitter

As at August 31, 2021 the social media platform Twitter shut down Twitter Fleets – the feature where users could share text, photos, videos and tweets that disappeared in 24 hours. The stories clone curtain closed because only existing Twitter diehards adopted it – thus it did not attract new users to the platform.

How can Twitter get people tweeting more?

“We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter.”

Ilya Brown

Can you beat the Half-life of a Post on Twitter?

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