The spread of a good tweet

Interesting case study on how a good tweet spreads even if the network is small. The tweet became viral and some media such as The Huffingtonpost, La Vanguardia or La Voz de Galicia published an article about it. It happened on March 13 when I saw this pretty good tweet on my timeline thanks to a @rafamerino’s RT. I retweeted it too when It was retweeted more than a thousand times. I was surprised to see that the author of the tweet had 92 followers (now, after the success of the tweet, that number is almost double). At that point I decided to study the spread of this tweet :

¿Pero quien escribe el teletexto de rtve ? …¿Juan Manuel de Prada? pic.twitter.com/zmXjq8TiW4

— Belén Fernández (@RosierBelen) 12 de marzo de 2014

Note: The poetic report about the stock exchange on the teletext is the work of an anonymous author who signed with the pseudonym Raimundo Diaz and every day publishes an article in Expansión (a Spanish economical newspaper) whit a single word headline. I never thought reading Market information could be so delicious. Examining in each minute the number of users who spread the tweet and the sum of their followers can presume what users helped to propagate the message. As shown in the figure below, when users with a high number of followers retweeted it, in the next minutes many users retweeted too. However, it is clear that popularity is not the same as influence, since the number of followers was not proportional to the number of induced propagation.

Presumed propagation inducers are:

1. reaction at 1:00: @lwtuaznar (12,2K followers), @ciudadfutura (13,7K followers) y @javigomezsexta (21,4K followers)
2. reaction at 8:00 (la mayor): @JotDownSpain (109K followers)
3. reaction at 11:00: @HiginiaRoig (67,3K followers)
4. reaction at 17:00: @euribor_com_es (87,6K followers)
5. rreaction at 22:00: @cdelamorTVE (52,2K followers), @JavierCapitan (102K followers) y @pacoleonbarrios (1.090K followers)

I wonder:

• Did the timing of the retweet determine the spread?
• Did the type of popular audience favour the virality of the tweet?

Methodology:

• We captured tweets containing the phrase “But who writes the rtve Teletext ” with the method search of Twitter API
• Computing with an own script (in Python) the number of users per minute that retweeted and their followers
• Obtain from authors’ location declared on their profile the geographical coordinates with google maps API
• Use Tableau Public to create the graph
• Use cartoDB with torque to generate the map