Recently Dan Zarella, who calls himself "The Social Media & Viral Marketing Scientist," studied millions of entries on Twitter to determine what makes a tweet retweetable. The results comprise a 22-page report, but a compelling and graphically enhanced version from Dan Macsai, an assistant editor at Fast Company, covers a lot of fascinating points.
What retweets and what doesn't? To a great extent, idle chat, including words such as "watching," "game," "bored," "gonna" and "sleep" scored low on the retweet scale; but standard social media fare, such as "check out," "blog post," "free," "social," "media" and "please retweet" scored high.
Most of the positive retweet dynamics, we're happy to report, include some mark of intelligence: For example, using actual punctuation improves retweetability (but stay away from the stodgy old semicolon), and retweeted material tends to have more syllables per word (which puts it slightly higher than random tweets on readability grade-level scales).
The report also covers URL shorteners, timing of tweets, parts of speech, original versus non-original content, and more. Read the Fast Company article here, and happy intelligent tweeting.
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