Ten Ways to Get Re-Tweeted
Unlike Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, the relationships on Twitter are not reciprocal. While both parties have to agree before a connection is established on Facebook (you send me a friend request and I approve it or vice-versa), the same is not true on Twitter, where I can follow you regardless of whether or not you are following me (and vice versa). As a result, when you repeat (or “Re-Tweet”) a message on Twittter, it is forwarded on to an entirely new set of people. The retweeting meme was quickly and spontaneously adopted by users of Twitter, and represents a powerful way to spread messages virally. The custom is simple: just indicate that you are retweeting a message with the prefix RT, then give credit to the original poster by including @[Poster's Username], followed by the original tweet. For example, if we tweeted:
Have a great day!
it would be retweeted as:
RT @NESocialMedia Have a great day!
Dan Zarella has spent more time investigating the science of Re-Tweeting than perhaps anybody on the planet. For those who are interested in learning more about Re-Tweeting, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his blog. In the meantime, I’ve taken some of his insights and distilled them into an easily digestible format.
According to Dan, 1.44% of all tweets are retweets. So, how do you get other people to retweet your messages? Here are some tips:
1. Have a Lot of Followers. It stands to reason that the more people following you, the greater the likelihoodthat some of them will retweet your message. However, not all followers are created equally. For example, men are more likely to retweet opinions, while women are more likely to retweet entertainment information. There are a number of tools that will help you build followers, such as TweetAdder, and the internet is littered with suggestions for attracting followers.
2. Leave Room. Twitter allows you to post messages that are up to 140 characters in length, but if a message is to be retweeted without editing, you’ll need to leave room for the retweeter to add “RT @[username]” to the front of it. Many retweeters like to add a comment of their own to the original message, too. If you don’t leave enough characters available for this, the retweeter has to do more work to shorten your original message, which not only makes them less likely to pass it along, but also increases the chances of your message’s meaning being altered. Avoid these issues by leaving room at the end of your tweet (Dan recommends capping your tweets at 120 characters).
3. Choose the Right Words. Dan’s research shows that some words are more likely appear in retweets than others. Top words include: you, twitter, please, retweet, post, blog, social, free, media. Here’s his comprehensive list. In general, messages that are retweeted tend to be written at a higher reading level and, on average, contain more syllables per word. Retweets also tend to contain a lot of nouns.
4. Avoid the Wrong Words. Dan has also compiled a list of the 20 least retweeted words. He points out some patterns: words ending in “-ing,” words revolving around sleep/bedtime, and slang.
5. Choose the Right Subjects. Messages that are conceptual (as opposed to emotional) are more likely to be retweeted. Tweeting about social behavior or instrumental behavior also increases the likelihood of a retweet. Dan points out, “Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities are more ReTweetable than Tweets about negative emotions, sensations, swear words and self-reference.” News is more likely to be retweeted.
6. Include Links. Dan’s research shows that retweets are far more likely to contain links than regular tweets: “…in a random sample of normal (non-ReTweet) Tweets, 18.96% contained a link, whereas 3 times that many ReTweets (56.69%) included a link.”
7. Use Bit.ly to Shorten Your Links. There are a number of URL shorteners out there that can translate a long, nasty looking link into something, well… short and nasty looking. Dan’s research shows that links shortened with Bit.ly are far more likely to be retweeted than those shortened with other services, including TinyURL.
8. Tweet at the Right Time. Dan’s discovered that retweeting grows steadily during the course of the weekday and is heaviest after 3pm EST. He also discovered that Friday is the heaviest day for retweeting.
9. Ask Nicely. It sounds simple, but asking people to “please” retweet your message works. (Just don’t overdo it.)
10. Do Unto Others… I know of no research on this particular point, but it stands to reason: just as you are apt to notice when others retweet your message, they are likely to notice when you retweet theirs. So if you want other people to retweet your messages, get in the habit of doing the same.
How do you track retweets to see what’s working and what’s not? Although there are tools out there that claim to be able to do this, perhaps the easiest way is to use Twitter’s own search function. In whichever third-party application you use to manage your Twitter account (I recommend that people never manage their account from Twitter.com itself; instead, try TweetDeck, Seesmic, CoTweet or HootSuite), set up a search for “RT @[Your Username]“. This will show you each time your messages are retweetsed You probably won’t have so many that you’re unable to count up the various retweets for each original message, but if you wanted to further subdivide your searches, you could set up a search with the the RT @UserName prefix and the first few words of each tweet.
Good luck…and pass it on!
