Top 5 Tips – How To Get A Re-Tweet On Twitter

Dan Zarrella, author of “The Social Media Marketing Book” recently published an analysis of Re-Tweeting on Twitter.    The paper is really worth reading if you’re a twitter user and is available by subscribing to Dan’s Blog.

 Here’s my quick pick of the top 5 tips:

1)      Links or no links?

The study of re-tweeting showed that 56.69% of re-tweets included links (compared to 18.96% of normal tweets)

This makes sense, as a re-tweet is essentially a way of sharing an idea or an item of news, and it’s unlikely that the 140 character limit is enough to encapsulate such information without relying on external sources.

Also of interest is that of those re-tweets which had links in them – by far the most popular way of shortening the URLs was to use bit.ly.   (see here for my SEOMoz post on using bit.ly)

2) Top 20 Words and phrases in a re-tweet

Of the 30 million tweets analysed by the study – the following list represented the top 20 most popular words :

Again this points to the fact that most re-tweets refer to external sources such as blog posts.

So a tweet announcing this blog post:

Check out my new social media blog post: Top 5 tips – how to get a retweet on twitter (please retweet)

 should go down well!!  🙂

3)      Punctuation

I believe this one again is due to the high proportion of re-tweets containing links, as punctuation is used to separate the link from the subject: 

 

4)      Subject Matter

Dan used a technique called LIWC to analyse the cognitive and emotional properties of tweets based on the words used.    Here you can see that a tweet is more likely to be re-tweeted if it discusses your occupation, the media, religion money, or insight.   The least likely to be re-tweeted are tweets about yourself!

 

5)      Time Of Day

I found the following graphs particularly interesting – and surprising!   The general flow of tweets throughout the day is fairly steady – with majority during working hours.  However Re-Tweets are far more likely between 3pm and midnight.

You’re also more likely to have your tweets re-tweeted on a Friday than on any other day of the week?   Odd that this doesn’t correlate with the random tweets?

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Dan’s website can be found here