A good reminder for all of us who use Twitter for our business efforts. In a January 11 CIO Magazine article, Dan Zarrella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book, shared the top 5 tricks to get retweeted. His recommendations are based on analysis of tens of thousands of tweets.
1. Time and day matter.
Zarrella’s research shows that to increase your chances of being retweeted, you should Tweet your links in afternoons, evenings and on weekends. More specifically, Friday yields the highest number of retweets, while retweeting occurs much more frequently from 3 p.m. to midnight.
2. Choose your words carefully.
Zarrella has found that the most retweetable word is “you.” “The word ‘you,’ while very common, seems to occur especially often in retweets, indicating that if you’re talking to ‘me,’ I am more likely to retweet it,” Zarrella says. The least retweetable words: game, going, haha, lol, but, watching, work, home, night and bed. “The lesson learned here is that if you’re trying to get more retweets, don’t just engage in idle chit-chat or tweet about mundane activities,” Zarrella suggests.
3. Include a link.
In a random sample of tweets, Zarrella found that about 19 percent included a link. Compare that to a sample of retweets, and the percentage almost triples—57 percent included links, suggesting that the presence of a link may increase a tweet’s chances of being shared.
4. Get friendly with bit.ly.
The most successful URL shortener, according to Zarrella’s research, is bit.ly, followed by ow.ly, most likely because they are newer and contain fewer characters, he says. The least retweetable URL shorteners are the older and longer tinyurl.com and twitpic.com.
5. Less is more.
“New data I’ve been working on seems to indicate that the more frequently you Tweet links, the fewer clicks you’ll get,” Zarrella says. If you tweet several times an hour, you decrease the likelihood of being retweeted. Keeping your tweets to one per hour will increase your chances of being retweeted.
To view the full article and accompanying graphs, click here.
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