Thread by @conspirator0

Does the amount of money offered or the deadline to retweet affect (or at least correlate with) the amount of engagement these "$X to someone who retweets this within the next <timespan>" giveaway tweets? #SaturdayShenanigans

cc: @ZellaQuixote

@ZellaQuixote We downloaded original tweets (non-retweets) containing "to someone who retweets this within the next", yielding 1062 tweets from 353 accounts. Almost all the activity is recent - June 2019 or later.

@ZellaQuixote Next, we parsed the various gift amounts being offered, excluding tweets offering something other than money or with ambiguous amounts. $5, $20, $50, and $100 are the prizes most frequently offered; €1,000,000,000 is presumably a joke.

@ZellaQuixote We did the same thing with the deadlines to retweet in order to be eligible to win. 1 hour (sometimes phrased as "60 minutes"), 12 hours, and 24 hours are the most common deadlines.

@ZellaQuixote We calculated baseline values for median retweets and likes per follower, using Twitter's ID scheme to obtain a random sample of 92269 tweets. Results:

median RTs per 1000 followers: 0.38 (1 RT per 2611 followers)
median likes per 1000 followers: 4.3 (1 like per 234 followers)

@ZellaQuixote (More info on Twitter's snowflake ID system; our random sample was obtained using a method similar to what's described in the "Reconstructing Twitter's firehose" article)
docs.google.com/document/d/1xV…

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1227063249440509952?s=20

@ZellaQuixote The giveaway tweets far exceed the baseline engagement values. Higher prize amounts correlate with higher engagement in two distinct ranges: $5 - $25 and $50 - $1000. (Higher amounts and extreme outliers not shown on figure.)

@ZellaQuixote Longer duration of contest also correlates with higher engagement (more strongly than prize amount.) This might be obvious - a longer duration provides greater opportunity for the tweet to be noticed - but also indicates most folks are checking the deadlines before interacting.