Art of Retweets: Top 10 Ways To Improve Your ReTweetability

Retweeting is a great way to share information and ideas, as well as bring a nice flood of social media targeted website traffic.

When you retweet someone, you show that you think enough of what they have written to share it with your followers and by doing that, increase their website traffic – one of the ultimate compliments on Twitter.

But how do you get tweeple to retweet your thoughts, pictures, videos?

That’s what my objective was when I set out to find the best retweeting tips out there.

Don’t worry. I am not going to talk about the obvious: your idea itself needs to be contagious, you need a great headline, etc. There are plenty of blog posts written about that.

I was more into discovering the “nuts and bolts” of a retweet: does it matter how many followers you have to become more “retweetable”? Is it in the words we use? The length, the links?

What does it REALLY take to generate tons of targeted website traffic via Twitter?

If you are really into the science of retweeting, visit Dan Zarrella’s blog at DanZarella.com and get his report “Science of Retweets”.

For everybody else who wants to increase their traffic by improving retweetability instantly, here are some practical tips to get you there.

1. Hours of the day: Peak tweet hours – business hours (between 9am-5pm; I guess that’s one of the very few advantages of having a J.O.B. – you get paid for tweeting). Peak retweet hours – 3pm to midnight.

Moral: if you want to be read, tweet in the morning; if you want to be retweeted, tweet at night.

2. Days of the week: The worst day for RT is Sunday; it picks up from there and peak RT day of the week is Friday, going back down from there.

3. Use links: Tweets with links are retweeted much more often.

4. Use Bit.ly: Bit.ly URL shorteners are retweeted the most (tinyurl is retweeted the least – don’t ask me why).

5. Length: forget 140 characters, the shorter the better. 120 characters is the new maximum if you have any chance to be retweeted.

6. Use hashtags: using existing hashtags greatly increases your findability by Twitter users and Twitter bots alike.

7. Short profile names help. This one is optional, but very helpful for obvious reasons. The shorter your name is the more space you leave for retweeting.

8. Punctuation matters: Overwhelming 93% of all retweets contain proper punctuation in them, particularly colons and periods. So pay attention to those small details.

9. Most Retweetable (read: generate the most targeted traffic:) Words & Phrases

1. you 11. please retweet

2. twitter 12. great

3. please 13. social media

4. retweet 14. 10

5. post 15. follow

6. blog 16. how to

7. social 17. top

8. free 18. blog post

9. media 19. check out

10. help 20. new blog post

As you can see, the word “you” ranks as number one – a reminder that we all like to be talked to on a personal level. If you are talking to “me”, then I am more likely to retweet you.

The word “please” is very important. If you want to be retweeted, ask for it and be polite while you are at it.

Tweeting about your new blog posts, particularly on social media, is a smart thing to do as well.

10. Least Retweetable (read: generate the least amount of targeted traffic) Words

1. game 11. well

2. going 12. sleep

3. haha 13. gonna

4. lol 14. hey

5. but 15. tomorrow

6. watching 16. tired

7. work 17. some

8. home 18. back

9. night 19. bored

10. bed 20. listening

As you can see, if you are talking about “you”, like telling someone we are going to bed and such, you won’t be retweeted. Generally, the –ing verbs, like “going”, “watching”, “listening” won’t get retweets either.

So, if you want to get retweeted, don’t answer the “What are you doing?” question and don’t get into idle chit-chat.

Well, that’s it for me, folks. I hope you enjoyed the reading.

If you did, would YOU PLEASE RETWEET MY NEW BLOG POST?

Also, if you want to do more research on retweeting, here is a tip: the most valuable advice I found was in the comments for posts.

Which means I need your help!

SHARE YOUR RETWEET TIPS AND RETWEET OURS!

• What are some of the things YOU like to Retweet?
• What do you like to see YOUR FOLLOWERS Retweet?
• Any tips you’d like to share on the best ways to get YOU to Retweet and bring me some more blog traffic ?

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