This survey is a few years old but I would imagine that the chances of a retweet have sunken even further considering there are now around 500 million tweets written per day.

People tweet because they want to be heard, whether it be for vanity reasons, to get new customers or to share an issue they are passionate about. That's why it can be really frustrating when you create a great piece of content, tweet about, wait to see what happens.... only to find that absolutely nothing happens.

We built a tool called Passle, which helps people create content very quickly and easily (like this very post which has taken me about 5 minutes) and then add in tweets to give it context. It's actually pretty clever but still it was hard to get the love we wanted for our content. So we built our Tweet Thank You tool - this simply creates a tweet for you to send to say thanks to the people whose tweets you have used. The results have been great. Of the four posts I have created and tweeted about since we launched the "Thank You" tool, all (100%) have had retweets and more importantly my posts have had 5 times the number of reads per day.

So I suppose the moral of the story is: Good manners pay.