Past studies have said that sharing photos on Facebook sparks engagement. According to a new study by Dan Zarrella of Hubspot, sharing photos on Twitter generates significant retweets too. Zarrella analyzed close to 500,000 tweets and found some interesting data.
Tweets that had photos and used Twitter’s own image uploading system were retweeted 94% more then if users uploaded photos by another 3rd party system such as Twitpic, which experienced a 64% retweet rate.
As some of you know Facebook and Twitter have been duking it our for years over becoming king of the social networks. After Facebook purchased Instragram, Twitter no longer provided access to users through their API. So it was no surprise to see tweets that included photos with Instagram links were 42% less likely to be retweeted. And Tweets that included Facebook images links were 47% less likely to be retweeted.
In short, photos appeared to increase retweet rates, unless the product was owned by Facebook. Sometimes I feel like 5 year-olds run these companies and who can't figure out how to play together on the playground. But I digress.
Check out the graphs that Zarrella shared based on his analysis.
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