Your company has a fantastic promotion going on. You fire up your Twitter account, and tweet the amazing news to your followers. And wait for something to happen. No one calls to take you up on the offer, and no one even bothers to retweet (RT) the info to spread the word. So, how do you increase your chances of a RT, and the chances exponentially more potential customers will see your promo?
Fast Company offers some tips in “Report: 9 Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter,” based on viral marketing expert Dan Zarrella’s nine months of research on more than 5 million tweets. Among them are:
Don’t use slang, abbreviations or emoticons. In other words, Zarella says, post more intellectual-sounding tweets. In fact, the top RTs use more syllables per word than those least likely to be RTed.
Use a third-person, headline style. “XYZ Company now offering two-for-one discount” makes more sense as a RT than “My company is giving stuff away!”
Don’t be mundane. Some of the least RT-able words include:
- Haha
- LOL
- Watching
- Eating
- Boring
- Work
- Home
- Bed
- Night
- Listening
- Sleep
- Tomorrow
- Gonna
...see a pattern emerging? Don’t be boring, or talk about how bored you are or even what you’re doing, unless you lead an incredibly exciting life. In other words, don’t expect a RT for “Eating grilled cheese and reading this interesting article on XYZ, LOL.”
Ask for the RT. It might seem like poor Twitter etiquette to add “please retweet,” but Zarella’s research shows that those exact words are highly RT-able. So are:
- Check out
- Please
- Help
- Blog post
- Great
- You
- How to
- Follow
Provide links, but not just any kinds of links. Some URL shortener services are more popular than others. Among them are bit.ly, ow.ly and is.gd; while older services, such as TinyURL can hinder your RT chances.
Use punctuation. Period. This harkens back to the first tip, avoiding slang and abbreviations. Be professional, be readable and don’t eschew commas and risk confusing your followers.
Day, time matters. 9 a.m. on Saturday is just about the worst possible time to hope for a RT. 4 p.m. on Friday is a virtual RT goldmine. In other words, think about the time followers are most likely to be online.
For more tips and interesting graphs, click on the source article below.
Source:
Fast Company: Report: 9 Scientifically Proven Ways To Get Retweeted On Twitter
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