Behold The Power of Twitter

At noon today, I had an opportunity to conduct a Twitter training class for physicians from one of our clinical departments at Mayo Clinic.

I wanted to show them the reach and speed of Twitter, and how it can spread messages widely and quickly. So, at 12:28, I put out this tweet to my Twitter followers:

Within seconds, the responses started coming in:

Update: I went back to Tweetdeck to capture the actual times of the tweets. I think it makes the speed of the spread even more interesting. It also shows the half-life of a tweet.

The tweets above all arrived in the first hour. Since then, a few more trickled in…

Altogether, that’s 57 replies or retweets from 21 states, the District of Columbia and Canada.

The total potential reach of the message- to my followers plus the followers of those who tweeted – was 66,986. Of course not everyone among those followers saw the message. If they didn’t happen to be watching Twitter at the time, they missed it.

Still, I think that’s pretty amazing for a lunchtime experiment.

Thanks to everyone who participated by replying or retweeting!