Whatsapp and user attention span

User attention

We're all part of many Whatsapp communities & groups these days where we seek out guidance and help. Have you ever found yourself wondering:

• How to get the attention of a group ?
• Whats the best time to post a query, or an announcement ?
• Should you post when theres less activity on the group, in the hopes that you don't get interrupted and more people see your post ?
• Or should you instead post when the group is most active ?

Chances are, you might have thought about this on more than one occasion.

What does the data show ?

SuperGroup's mission statement is to enable users to get more value out of the community. Since we capture all the messages being sent, we can focus our attention to replies or quoted messages.

One way to visualize this is to plot the number of messages & time between the original message, and the reply.

Say post P2 is a reply to post P1. We should look at the number of messages in between, and the time difference in between.

Data structures

For every post with a quoted message, lets save this data structure:

class Post {
    replyId: string;
    quotedMessageId: string;
    groupId: string;
    numMessagesDelta: int;
    timeDeltaMs: int;
}

We should plot numMessagesDelta and timeDeltaMs. And look at the percentiles (tp50, tp95, tp99) to get a sense of whats happening.

Number of messages sent between replies

The graph shows that majority of the replies have between 1 to 10 other messages exchanged in between the reply and the original message. Some have between 10 and 20 messages. The bulk of the weight is between 0 to 20 messages.

This suggests that posts older than the 20 latest are unlikely to get replies or comments.

Number of minutes between replies

The graph shows that majority of the replies occur between 0.3 and 25 minutes from the original message. Some replies go upto 50 minutes. Again, its safe to say that the chances of getting a reply after 60 minutes is low.

Note that this pattern is usual of professional groups. Personal groups tend to be smaller and sometimes more sporadic.

Moral of the story

Out of sight, out of mind.

You want to post when the group is starting to get engaged, and be the reason that engages the group 😀

Reach out if you'd like to get insights for your groups & communities.

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