A New Generation Marketer

On Friday I tuned into Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella talking about the ‘Science of Retweets.’ He has compiled some great information and reserach on how and why people retweet. For those of you who were unable to tune in, below are my favorite take-aways from the webinar that can help you receive more retweets on Twitter:

Cool Stat: 100,000,000 retweets have been recorded thus far!

1. Keep your tweets to 100-120 characters long to allow for people to RT and add in their comments.

2. About 65% of retweets contain links because people naturally like to share information, and Twitter is a main broadcast medium for sharing and creating conversations around the links.

3. If you want more retweets, find great content on the web that people will want to share.

4. bit.ly is the most popular and most common URL shortener, so try to shorten your links to bit.ly. Avoid tinyurl; it is the largest URL shortener character-wise, thus less popular.

5. If you want to increase your chances of being retweeted, use the most popular words: you (people like when you talk to or about them, naturally), Twitter, please, retweet, post, blog, social, free (people like free stuff!), media, help (“help me spread the word”), please retweet, great, social media, 10, follow, How To, top, blog post, check out (calls to action are always great), and new blog post.

6. Retweets in general are composed of longer words and more syllables.

7. Retweets are smarter, using higher levels of words and content, so you don’t need to dumb down your tweets for them to get retweeted.

8. Retweets are more novel, meaning the words and information in them tend to occur less frequently. In general, talk about stuff that is less common and more unique so that people will find it interesting, eye-catching, and thus will retweet it.

9. Retweets are noun-heavy and also use adverbs and proper nouns.

10. Retweets are more emotional, conceptual and social.

11. Do NOT reference to yourself a lot; people don’t want to know what YOU are doing- that is boring to us!

12. Retweet content types by popularity: 1. News, 2. Instructional (How-To guides), 3. Entertainment, 4. Opinion, 5. Products, 6. Small Talk

13. Know who your main Twitter audience is. In general women tend to retweet entertainment-based information, whereas men tend to retweet opinion-based content.

14. Timing: It is BEST to tweet between 1 pm and 10 pm (4-5 pm is the prime time). It is WORST to tweet between 3 am and 12 pm (people are either sleeping or catching up on morning tasks).

Friday is the BEST day for retweets, then Wednesday, Monday and Thursday.
Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays are the WORST days for retweets, so avoid putting great content out there on these days; save it for Fridays.

15. It is important to thank your retweeters, but don’t overdo it. For example, if thirty people RT your message, either only thank the loyal retweeters, DM everyone, or mention a few people in a thank you tweet so you don’t overload their Twitter feed with individual thank you’s, and it is annoying for you to have to do that as well.

REMEMBER: Retweeting other people’s links is just as important, and can be good karma, if you believe in that. Recognize those that retweet your information a lot, and do the same for them; they will always appreciate it.

So, lets conduct an experiment. To see if the power of retweets that Zarrella talks about is really true, lets see how many retweets we can get this article to have. Lets use #KristinD as the hashtag so you all can track the effectiveness of this. I’ll tweet this article out throughout this week and you all can check in on the hashtag #KristinD and see how our little experiment goes!