Dan Macsa at Fast Company is out with a story on proven ways to get retweeted They come from….fascinating! They come from viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella in “The Science of Retweeting.”
1. Link Up (But Don’t Use TinyURLs)
In Zarrella’s sample, links were three times more prevalent in RTs than normal tweets (19% to 57%).
2. Beggars Can Be Choosers
“Please” and “retweet” were his third and fourth “most retweetable” words, preceeded only by “Twitter” (duh) and “you.” Also worth noting: “Check out” and “new blog post” were Nos. 19 and 20, respectively.
3. Avoid Idle Chit-Chat
“There are a number of ‘-ing’ verbs, including ‘going,’ ‘watching’ and ‘listen-ing,'” that were not retweeted very often, he writes.
4. Don’t Be Stupid
So much for abbrevs and emoticons. 😦 Zarrella’s RTs not only have more syllables per word than normal tweets (1.62 vs. 1.58), but they’re also more intellectual: Per a Flesch-Kincaid test, comprehending RTs requires 6.47 years of education, while normal tweets require just 6.04.
5. Semicolons = Satan
A whopping 98% of RTs contain some form of punctuation (compared with 86% of normal tweets), with colons, periods, exclamation points, commas, and hyphens leading the way.
6. Break News
This one’s kind of a no-brainer, but original content is way more popular than stuff we’ve already read.
7. Use Proper Nouns Properly
Most RTs were heavier on nouns, proper nouns and 3rd-person verbs, suggesting that headline-style tweets–such as “Lindsay Lohan Escapes From Rehab Facility”–are more likely to go viral.
8. Bottle Those Emotions
Tweets about work, religion, money and media/celebrities are more retweetable than those invo
Digital 3000 