The Art of Getting ReTweeted

Is there an art to getting ReTweeted on Twitter? Dan Zarrella says yes and has been studying the "Science of ReTweeting" for the past nine months. Zarrella analyzed five million tweets and 40 million retweets and compared the two, noting the time of day they were tweeted and ReTweeted, which words and url shorteners were used most often, and more. Check out the results of Zarrella's study below.

Twitter’s most Suggested Users (Comprised of Famous People and News Networks) are Less ReTweetable.
Why? Their tweets are not truly engaging their community and use one way communication. BTW, Zarrella is not a fan of the idea "engage in conversations."  He says it's not "actionable advice" and that tweets should be "contagious." Personally, I think the word "contagious" is a big buzz word that is thrown around by marketing people. The point is if you don't engage your audiences, you won't get ReTweeted because your tweets are boring and not providing value to followers.

Tweets that Contain a URL are 3x more ReTweeted
Url shortners bit.ly, Owl.ly and is.gd are more ReTweetable then using longer urls or tinyurl.

Calls to Action Work

• “Please ReTweet this” are very ReTweetable. Be strategic though. Don’t always tweet something and tag on please ReTweet. It should be timely, special, etc.

• “New Blog Post” followed by what post is about is ReTweetable.

Short Tweets Are Best
Since you only have 140 characters to tweet – short words perform better than longer words in generating RT’s.

Use Proper Nouns
Many ReTweets use nouns, proper nouns and 3rd-person verbs. This suggests that headline based Tweets such as "Frogloop Launches Social Networking Calculator"--are more likely to go viral.

ReTweeting Occurs more Frequently Between 3PM and 12AM.
Monday’s and Fridays’ are the most ReTweetable days.

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