The paper also assessed reaction times dependent on the number of Twitter followers. The researchers put the former and latter’s more sluggish responses to not being active users on the one hand, and having too many messages to get through on the other:
For those with between 10 and 100 followers, half of all reactions to posts will arrive after 41 minutes on average
If you have between 100 and 1,000 followers, or between 10,000 and 100,000, that number turns into a more brisk 20 minutes
If you have more than a million followers – between 1m and 10m – it goes up to 108 minutes
The report’s other top finding relates to how geographical differences affect posting reactions. In San Francisco and New York, reactions peak at the beginning of working hours; for Paris, it’s during the second half of the working day; whereas for London, most reactions are limited to the very end of the working day. It’s worth noting here that this gives a fascinating indicator into how countries tend to spend their working hours – or not, as the case may be. Going back to Waite's rules of social media, rule #37 - the majority of people use social media to waste time - is of interest here. In terms of more general trends, Twitter has more peaks and valleys throughout the day and almost halves its weekly amplitude on weekends, while Facebook is more consistent.
Only first degree reactions, such as shares, retweets and comments from the original post, were included for the study. Using Klout’s platform, where user posts and follower graphs were collected through the oauth-token from registered Klout users, the data, of 144 million posts and more than 1.1 billion reactions, was fed into a Hadoop cluster and put into a pipeline.
The paper, which is on the academic side, delves deep into these trends, focusing on variables which may affect reaction time and output, such as manner of posting and presentations of posts, as well as putting together a series of personalised posting schedules for users.