Reuse, Recycle, Retweet? The Art…and Science…of Twitter
Tweet and Re-Tweet
We all know and admire people who have elevated tweeting to an art form. Finally, for the rest of us, something we can really wrap our heads…and our fingers…around.
In “The Science of Retweeting”, Hubspot viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella has gotten the art of tweeting down to a science, and with great certainty can predict not only what words are most likely to be retweeted, but the best day and time to send out the 140-character missive. And on today’s brave new social media landscape, where apps change faster than you can download them, there’s some measure of comfort in those measurements.
Zarella studied 5 million tweets and 40 million retweets, more than Ryan Seacrest, Ashton Kutcher, Oprah Winfrey or Kim Kardashian have to comb through, to get his results. Fast Company’s Dan Mascai has done such a good job of laying it all out with charts and graphs in his Nine Scientifically Proven Ways to Get Retweeted on Twitter post that I’ll just cut to the chase here.
Do use links, but preferably shortened with bit.ly, ow.ly and is.gd. Tinyurl’s effectiveness is shrinking faster than a Tweetdeck link.
RT @PokenGirl: the Poken Pulse has been launched! http://bit.ly/1ZjRiD Avail for pre-order http://bit.ly/pokenpulse #yagottagetone!
Manners count. The phrase “Please Retweet” is met with positive results, not spammy disregard. In fact, you, twitter, please and retweet (in that order) are the four most Re-Tweetable words in the English language. Or at least the parts of that language that have appeared on Twitter. The least? Game, going, haha and–you’re gonna love this one–lol.
And punctuate, please! Ninetyeight percent of RTs include some form of punctuation. The colon ranks highest here. Headline style tweets containing nouns and proper nouns combined with third-person verbs get the fingers flying. And don’t second that emotion. Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities get more RT action than negative comments, complaints and references to self.
Best time and day to tweet? Four PM on Fridays. Guess weekend-watchers are catching a little early 5 o’clock whistle action…and re-tweeting it! How would you explain it?