Social Networking Distribution – Power of the reTweet

“by a conservative estimate, two tweets by journalists — my colleague and me — that took about two seconds of our time potentially reached nearly 3,000 people in less than 20 minutes. That doesn’t mean all 3,000 read the tweet, went to the link or were even online at the time”, but the potential is there.

The power of retweeting has been seen by almost everyone on Twitter, but an example of mine was with the story about police seizing a member of the public’s mobile phone and deleting content. I first Tweeted the link at 5.45pm on December 26 (Boxing Day, a public holiday).
From my calculations in less than three hours nine people including me distributed that story to a network of 7600 people. Of course they didn’t all see the link, or click on it if they did see it, but as Gina Chen said, it shows the potential for news distribution via social networking.

Admittedly I also gained an advantage by being part of mainstream media, but earlier tweets propagating the original story from Ben Grubb were also distributed as widely, or wider, than my later tweets.