Periscope

Twitter, like most other major social networks, has pushed to make live video a feature of its platform. To do this, it acquired Periscope in January 2015, and incorporated it into the network in March of that year.

Now, Periscope lets marketers and Twitter users of all kinds create live video through their Twitter accounts. For many, the ability to broadcast live presents an exciting opportunity - especially for brands trying to make a real-time connection.

So do Periscope videos engage users at a higher rate than regular tweets?

Download full report (33 pages)

Periscope Engagement Rates

Video is widely seen as being more engaging than ordinary social media content. It makes sense that live video should drastically increase engagement rates, since it's happening live.

But Periscope is free and open to everyone, including those with small followings and no video marketing expertise. It may be this that causes average engagement rates to be in fact lower than ordinary tweets.

However, the median number of engagement is substantially higher for Periscope videos. This likely indicates that the ordinary Periscope user in fact creates a better quality of content, but that Periscope videos rarely attract the high numbers of engagements seen by some tweets.

Average and median engagement rates

Average number of engagements

781.166879
Median number of engagements

42

Periscope Retweet Rates

To go deeper into engagements, let's look specifically at retweets. We see that the average number of retweets for Periscope videos is actually lower than the number of retweets for all posts.

We should remember that averages can be skewed heavily by posts at the extremes. When a tweet from a global celebrity is retweeted millions of times, it increases the average for all posts.

Not one of the top 30 tweets of all time involves Periscope. And it's unlikely that Periscope videos will reach the same level of virality as any of these leading tweets. Download full report (33 pages)

Average number of retweets (Periscope)

726.98
Average number of retweets (all)

1690.46

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