Imagine if you discovered the formula for the perfect tweet—a message so
perfect that Twitter users can’t help but follow your account and
retweet your post.
Well, hold on to your Twitter handles, because the perfect tweet has been discovered, in theory.
Last week, researchers at UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs released a
nine-page paper on how to predict the social media popularity of a news
article before it is published. Astonishingly, the researchers developed
a tool that forecasts popularity with an 84 percent accuracy rate.
The Atlantic’s Megan Garber dived deeper into the study, exploring how the research can help media outlets craft tweets that will be shared and clicked.
But HP Labs isn’t the first organization to try to predict the
popularity of a tweet. Dan Zarrella, a “social media scientist” with the
marketing firm HubSpot, has conducted exhaustive research on the topic.
In 2009, he spent nine months analyzing 5 million tweets and 40 million
retweets. He published the results in “The Social Media Marketing Book”
(as well as other articles and infographics).
PR Daily compiled Zarrella’s research and that of UCLA and HP
Labs for this advice on the perfect tweet. (We also put the tips into
action.)
Here are eight tips for writing the perfect tweet:
1. Include links. Tweets that included a link were three times
more prevalent in retweets than those without, according to Zarrella’s
researcher. That means you don’t tell your Twitter audience, “We
conducted some great research.” You show them the research by sharing a
link to where they can find it (your blog, ideally).
2. Opt for timely news (most of the time). Zarrella found
that tweets mentioning news were the most shared. Rest assured,
however, that if you can’t share breaking news—and 99 percent of the
time a new “solution” is not breaking—evergreen advice will do the
trick. The most shared tweets beyond news were instructional in nature,
followed by entertainment, opinion, products, and small talk.
3. Share tech news (or maybe mention a celebrity). This won’t
apply to everyone with a Twitter account, but the researchers at UCLA
and HP Labs said tweets about tech news were the most shared. Health
news and “fun stuff” were Nos. 2 and 3 in terms of popularity. The study
also said that mentioning a celebrity, such as @LadyGaga, will probably
result in a popular tweet.
4. Use “you” instead of “I.” Specific words can spark retweets,
Zarrella deduced. Among the words most commonly found in heavily shared
tweets are “you,” “Twitter,” “please,” “retweet,” “post,” and “check
out.” Another term found often in these tweets is “please retweet.”
Despite these findings, asking someone to “please retweet” is a practice
you should avoid. It’s tacky—no matter what science tells you.
5. Calm down. With all the noise online, especially in the
Twittersphere, it stands to reason that a frantic tweet with a healthy
dose of hyperbole would stand out. For example: “INCREDIBLE photo. You
MUST check it out IMMEDIATELY!” Not so, say researchers at UCLA and HP
Labs. Objective language performs as well as subjective, they
discovered.
6. Embrace verbosity, to an extent.
Zarrella found
that as the length of tweets grew, so did the number of clicks for a
link in the tweet. Once the tweet reached 130 characters, the number of
click-throughs fell, so don’t go above 130, if possible. You’ll probably
want to shoot for fewer, in case someone wants to retweet you and
include his or her own comment.
7. Use punctuation, especially colons and periods. Nearly all
retweets have some form of punctuation, according to Zarrella. Colons
and periods were by far the most common. Surprisingly, question marks
weren’t common in retweets, nor were semicolons. The latter isn’t
surprising; most people misunderstand this handy punctuation mark and
therefore tend to avoid it.
8. Drop a brand name. “Brand, even and especially on the Internet, matters,” Garber writes in
The Atlantic.
She’s referencing the UCLA and HP Labs data, which determined that
reliable sources—such as media outlets and brand names—led to more
commonly shared tweets. That doesn’t mean, however, that established
media brands only will garner retweets. UCLA and HP Labs found that in
some cases the opposite was true. Stories shared by popular traditional
media—Reuters, AP,
Christian Science Monitor—received fewer tweets than upstart media such as
Mashable and
AllFacebook.
Even corporate and marketing blogs, among them Google’s blog and Seth
Godin’s blog, sparked more retweets than many “old” media sources.
Based on HP Labs’ research, Garber wrote the “perfect news tweet.” It comes from
The New York Times, and says:
Bits Blog: Apple Buddies Up With Cheaper Wireless Partners for iPhone nyti.ms/LcLviE
Kind of boring, isn’t it? (Something that Garber noted in her post for
The Atlantic.)
Let’s apply Zarrella’s lessons and see if we can kick out something else, a tweet that might be ideal for a brand. How about:
Check out the latest release from Apple and what it means for you: [LINK]
The link could take your followers to a post on your blog. Also a tad dull, but it should work, in theory.
Now that you know how to write the perfect tweet, find out the ideal time to send it for maximum exposure
here.
(via
The Atlantic,
PCMag,
Fast Company)
(Image
via)