So today st 10:28 GMT, the Pope, head of the largest religious institution on Earth sent his first tweet from his English language @Pontifex account.
How did it do? As information cascades go, it must rank as one of biggest on Twitter, and the best for a first tweet.
First off some context.
Although the account was registered a long time ago, it was only announced as the Pope’s account two weeks ago. Since then he acquired over 670,000 followers on the account before he sent that tweet. Nowhere near say Britney Spears with her 22 million followers, but impressive for an account that’s never tweeted.
We analysed Britney, Russell Brand and Charlie Sheen’s last 10 tweets and on average they got 1416, 174 and 215 Retweets, a retweet to follower ratio of 0.006% and 0.003% and 0.003%.
Dear friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.
— Benedict XVI (@Pontifex) December 12, 2012
The Pope’s first tweet’s Retweets, number 36,000 after only 3 hours, divided by 800,000 (yes its grown by almost 130,000 since that tweet) come to 4.512%.
Yes, that’s a Retweet rate of nearly 5%. More than a 100 times greater than the averages Mr Booky-wook and Tiger Blood.
The Pope’s Tweet still has some way to go before it beat’s Obama’s most retweeted tweet of all time, which has now been retweeted over 800,000 times.
Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012