Twitter Study: Images Impact Tweets, Time of Day Has Minimal Effect

A study released by Framingham-based digital marketing agency Stone Temple Consulting reveals that using images in tweets has an even more powerful impact on engagement than previously thought.

However, in contradiction to some previous studies, the Stone Temple analysis found that time of day has very little effect on the likelihood of being re-tweeted.

The study examines over 4 million tweets, making it one of the largest Twitter studies to date.

Stone Temple’s study also segments the data in ways not heretofore included in published Twitter studies.

The study looks at tweets in terms of the social authority of the Twitter account, as well as by language groups.

Impact of media tweets: While other studies have confirmed that tweets that include embedded media (images or videos) get more engagement, the Stone Temple study showed that such tweets generate more than double the re-tweets and favorites of text-only tweets.

• Retweets: 68% of tweets with media are re-tweeted vs. 30% of text-only tweets.
• Favorites: 74% of tweets with media are favorited vs. 38% of text-only tweets.

Moreover, while high authority accounts certainly get far more engagements than lower authority users, the effect of media tweets is actually more profound for lower authority accounts. Low authority accounts get 2.3 to 2.7 times more engagement for media tweets, whereas high authority accounts get 1.0 to 1.3 times more engagement.

Impact of time of day: Perhaps one of the more surprising findings of the Stone Temple study was that the time of day in which a tweet is posted has little significant effect on the likelihood of being re-tweeted. The percentage of tweets getting re-tweeted varies from only 35% to 37% throughout a 24-hour period.

Impact of hashtags: The study found that inclusion of hashtags in a tweet increases the likelihood of it being re-tweeted, but less so than media in the tweet. 49% of tweets with hashtags are re-tweeted, versus 32% of those with no hashtags.

Impact of links: Having at least one URL link in a tweet also increases the likelihood of being re-tweeted, but less so than for media or hashtags. The Stone Temple study found that 43% of all tweets with a link get re-tweeted, while 33% of those without a link receive that engagement.

Read the complete study here.

Stone Temple Consulting, with offices in Framingham and California, is a digital marketing agency, providing consulting on search engine optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine penalty recovery to primarily Fortune 500 companies.