Keys to Your Wealth

Dan Zarella, a social media and viral marketing scientist,  gave a great talk on the Science of Retweets. What is that you ask? It's looking at the things that make a tweet retweetable.

What makes tweeter such a powerful media is the fact that it can go viral. The process necessary for a message to go viral is that people retweet it. To get your messages out and create a viral explosion, knowing the kinds of things that make your messages retweetable can help.

So, let's take a look at some of the things Dan shared that help make a tweet more retweetable.

Less than 25% of all tweets have links in them. Over 50% of Retweets have links in them. More content appears to be part of why people retweet.

The shortener bit.ly is in the number one spot and number two, ow.ly, is barely visible. When shortening tweets, use bit.ly

In order, the 20 most used significant words are: you, twitter, 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. So when appropriate, use them or change your message to incorporate them.

My first reaction to twitter was “What a waste of time!” The crowd I hung around simply said "Twitter is stupid!" Little did I know that not far in the future, Twitter would have a significant impact on marketing.

I mean, I saw the value in short messages to groups of people. Not messages like "I'm sitting at my desk bored to death". I was thinking more along the lines of "This place is packed! Get here soon, I'm in the back next to the Juke Box". At best, I thought that we could maybe replace the company pager's and just let Twitter provide an SMS message.

The Accelerated Twitter Growth article started me on the twitter path. Over 2,000 new followers in about 20 days. The team that provided us with the service gave us some new tips.

They cleared up why the number of followers and folks we are following goes up and down. Apparently there are some clear rules and ratios that Twitter expects accounts to follow. Growth has to fit within the rules or Twitter will close down the account.