How do we spread on Twitter?

The emergence of new communication means such as online newspapers and exchange and sharing websites allow us to go further in the understanding of diffusion phenomena. Indeed, these public discussion areas are now firmly established in our societies and are known to be strong sensors of both human behaviors and collective feelings. In this paper we focus on diffusion phenomena that occur on Twitter and we propose a set of measures that aims to characterize globally and locally the processes. Our objective is to identify what are the conditions in which a person decides to forward the information. Our measures have been used to study two events occurred in January 2015: the presentation of Microsoft HoloLens, a new augmented reality headset, and the political election in Greece. The results obtained show a strong heterogeneity in the individual behaviours involved in the diffusion process. Our approach has been implemented into a graphical tool which is able to conduct real time analysis on any kind of topics occurring on Twitter.