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.

Dan listed the bottom 20 words. I'm not going to list them here but think about people tweeting "I'm bored", "just sitting here watching and listening", "eating breakfast", and "about to take a nap". Quit tweeting about yourself and your boring routine activities.

Kinda weird, but retweets have more syllables per word. Not only that, they use more punctuation, particularly colons and periods. Use proper english and don't talk dumb, apparently retweeters are a pretty smart crowd who prefer correct english.

The top retweet content types (in order) are News, Instructional, Entertainment, Opinion, Products, & Small Talk. Now here's something strange, males are mostly in the Opinion section and females are the rest. Hmmm. No idea what that means. I didn't really believe that men are more opinionated than women. [Note: It appears from the talk that Opinion really means politics.]

Retweets seem to peak around 4-5 pm EST. Most retweets occur on Friday. So, sending your message out around 1-2 pm on a Friday on the west coast is probably a good time to improve your chances for a retweet.

You can see the entire presentation by going to the link:

       http://www.hubspot.com/archive/science-of-retweets

Dan currently works as a product owner at HubSpot and recently authored The Social Media Marketing Book

Rich Freeman, Keys to Wealth