Top 5 Tips: How to help get you more ReTweets & new Twitter followers (great post, please RT)

I just reviewed the webinar: “The Science of ReTweets” (Viral Content Sharing on Twitter) by Viral Marketing Specialist @DanZarrella of HubSpot.  It was an hour of charts and graphs of statistical information about ReTweets, and how to get more of them.  I found to be quite helpful (as I do most HubSpot content).

Here are 5 tips I took away from this helpful webinar (and at the end of this post an expirement using the thoughts shared in this webinar to try to generate some ReTweets).

Tip 1:   Don’t be boring.  Going to sleep? Nobody cares…

There are words to avoid in your tweets that typically don’t get ReTweeted often.  Words like:  tired, sleep, bored, gonna, watching…    If you are climbing into bed watching a show on tv and listening to a song on your iPod – you don’t need to tweet about it. Chances are it won’t get ReTweeted anyway.

Tip 2:  Keep your tweet under 100 characters.  Make it easy to RT.

Kraft your tweet in such a way that your followers don’t need to edit/shorten it to make it fit within the 140 character limits of Twitter.  This is a great rule of thumb to consider when writing blog post titles.  Write them in such a way they can be easily ReTweeted (espcially if you are using a tool such at TweetMe).

Note: When someone RTs, your longer tweets do get shortened via a link to the original tweet.  Just something to keep in mind.  Shorter is better.

Tip 3:  Don’t self promote (and do nothing else)

Clearly, we use Twitter for the purpose of self-promotion or promoting the companies we work for – however…  Twitter is about relationships – provide value, share information freely, and look for ways to mutually help people that you communicate on Twitter.  You may be awesome, but don’t repeatedly tell the world that.  They wont ReTweet that content, and in fact – will probably un-follow at some point.

Just BE awesome, without telling the world you are awesome.  They’ll figure it out on their own.

Tip 4:  Keep it clean people

Swearing in your tweets may get your point across and people may agree with you, but chances are you will not get ReTweeted.  I may agree with your sentiment, but I will not Tweet bad language to my followers out of respect for them.  Negative emotions can have a positive reaction – if presented in a diplomatic and effective way.

Tip 5:  People don’t read, they scan – choose your words wisely

People this is not rocket science.  Depending on your follower base and how many they follow, you have about a fraction of a second get someone’s attention via your tweet.  Make it short, concise and interesting.   Statistics show that certain words get ReTweeted more than others.  Some of these words include:  you, help,  how to, new, etc…

Kraft your tweet in such a way that stands out, and makes your point clearly without using big words.

And now for the “experiment“

The title of this blog adheres to the rules which I’ve outlined above.   I will Tweet it once the post is published   It is under 100 characters (and will fall around 120 once I drop in the bit.ly link to this post).  I’ve also used a combination of the most ReTweeted words according to the webinar.  So we’ll see how much it get’s ReTweeted!  (I’m also sending this out at around 3:15 PM EST which is one of the higher ReTweet times of the day)

In summary – the Webinar was well worth the hour of my time, and has made me put more thought into how I create my tweets and what they will say going forward – not only for me, but for the company I represent on Twitter.

Happy Tweeting (PLEASE ReTweet)!

Tagged as: retweet, tweetdeck, twitter