Have you ever felt like you're tweeting but no one's reading? Well, you may be right, for a new study has revealed that 71 per cent of tweets are ignored.

The study, conducted by Sysomos, a media monitoring and analytics firm, examined 1.2 billion tweets sent in August and September 2009 and found that more than seven in every 10 tweets sink without any kind of reaction from the world.

Of the remainder, just six percent get retweeted, and 92 per cent of those retweets occur within the first hour.

Multiplying those probabilities together means that fewer than one in 200 messages get retweeted after an hour's gone by. Essentially, once that hour's up, your message is ancient history, which leaves 23 per cent of messages that get an @reply, 'Wired.com' reported.

Drilling down, Sysomos found that 85 per cent of replied-to messages get just one reply, 10.7 per cent get two, and just 1.53 per cent get three replies. And, similarly to retweets, 96.9 per cent of @replies are posted within an hour of the original tweet.

It's not clear how the company treated messages that were both replied-to and retweeted.

The company also commissioned an animated visualisation of the data. In the video embedded below, the spiral represents time, with the size of the blue dot representing the number of retweets and replies to that tweet.

Following one dot over time, you should see it slowly grow as it gets replied-to and retweeted.

So, keep this in mind the next time you tweet.