When someone hits the retweet button on one of your tweets, it means they feel your tweet was noteworthy enough to recognize it or increase its visibility to other users; a retweet is one of the greatest compliments in all of microblogging.
The Importance of Being Retweeted
1) If users deem your tweets funny, informative, or useful, other users will be more inclined to follow you (and retweet you!). The more followers you have, the more powerful your network becomes, the more likely someone will retweet you!
2) Traffic! The more often you get that rascally retweet, the more times your product, service, blog or website are placed in front of potential visitors with no additional by you!
3) The Retweet is a factor in determining Social Influence standings with sites such as Klout (See:Higher Klout Scores Mean More Successful Websites by Dan Zarella)
But if you think that increasing your following/network, driving traffic to your website or blog and working to increase your Social Media influence aren’t an amazing investment into your business, just pack up shop numbskull, because you are doing it wrong!
The Most Effective Ways to get Retweeted!
1) Retweet other users! Many of the best ways to increase your network and visibility using Twitter are derived from reciprocation: I’ll follow you if you follow me, I’ll mention you if you mention me, I’ll retweet you if you retweet me, etc.
2) Using the psychology and science of effective headlines, as outlined by Tim Ferriss:
Never tell the whole story in the headline if you want optimal click-through. “Home Prices Drop 47%, Largest Single-Quarter Drop in 50 Years” isn’t nearly as good as “Largest Drop in Home Prices Since 1960: The Reasons, Numbers, and What You Can Do.” There’s another element in the latter that makes it superior: it’s prescriptive instead of merely descriptive. People don’t want more information about their problems; they want solutions to their problems.
Piquing curiosity can be done with questions instead of statements, and my question-based post titles are some of the best performing (such as “Why Are You Single? Perhaps It’s The Choice Effect“), unless used more than 20% of the time, at which point, it appears that readers suffer “question burnout” and click-through plummets. This is a common problem with (over)use of lists (“17 Things You Can Do For…” etc.).
Would “Why Are You Single?” have worked well by itself? I don’t think so. But what the hell is “The Choice Effect”? Once again, this is exactly the point. I want that question to bother you enough that you click on the link and, most important, read the piece.
3) Use the most popular retweet words or phrases (duh!)! The Top 20 Most Retweetable Words or Phrases according to Social Media Scientist Dan Zarella are:
- You
- Please
- Retweet
- Post
- Blog
- Social
- Free
- Media
- Help
- Please Retweet
- Great
- Social Media
- 10
- Follow
- How to
- Top
- Blog post
- Check out
- New Blog Post
Zarella goes on to say:
The word “you” while very common, seems to occur especially often in ReTweets, indicating that if you’re talking to “me” I’m more likely to ReTweet it.
Its really not surprising that “Twitter” ranks high, but this is a good reminder that self-reference is always good for buzz in social media.
Again we see “please” and “please ReTweet” (“please rt” also ranked highly). I’ve written about this a few times, but its hard to overstate how important it is to ask for the ReTweet when you want it, calls to action work.
The word “free” seems to remind is to provide value, especially value at no cost to our readers, as does the word help.
The occurrence of the word “help” could indicate either a tweet that promises to help you or a request for help. Whichever it is, it reinforces both providing value and calls to action.
“Social Media” as a phrase ranks high, so again, don’t be afraid to tweet about tweeting, blogging, networking, digging, etc.
The number “10” made a surprise appearance high on the list. Top 10s are popular, always have been and always will be, don’t forget it. The word “top” also made an appearance on the list.
“New Blog Post” is the common prefix used when a person tweets about, well, a new blog post to their site. That this ranks so highly tells us that tweeting your posts is a very smart thing to do.
4) Choose your tweeting time and method wisely in order to increase the chances for a retweet! Ana at the Traffic Generation Cafe urges those seeking a retweet to consider the following:
1. Hours of the day: Peak tweet hours – business hours (between 9am-5pm; I guess that’s one of the very few advantages of having a J.O.B. – you get paid for tweeting). Peak retweet hours – 3pm to midnight.
Moral: if you want to be read, tweet in the morning; if you want to be retweeted, tweet at night.
2. Days of the week: The worst day for RT is Sunday; it picks up from there and peak RT day of the week is Friday, going back down from there.
3. Use links: Tweets with links are retweeted much more often – meaning: send your social media generated traffic to good content.
4. Use Bit.ly: Bit.ly URL shorteners are retweeted the most (tinyurl is retweeted the least – don’t ask me why).
5. Length: forget 140 characters, the shorter the better. 120 characters is the new maximum if you have any chance to be retweeted.
6. Use hashtags: using existing hashtags greatly increases your findability by Twitter users and Twitter bots alike.
7. Short profile names help. This one is optional, but very helpful for obvious reasons. The shorter your name is the more space you leave for retweeting.
8. Punctuation matters: Overwhelming 93% of all retweets contain proper punctuation in them, particularly colons and periods. So pay attention to those small details.
So there it is folks! Tips from some of the greatest social media minds of our day (and me!) on how to increase your retweets!
Please follow me @CommandCS
