Content marketing conjures up ideas of branded video, thought-provoking blogs and educational white papers or webinars. Yet every piece of messaging put out by your company counts towards your content strategy, no matter how brief. Do you consider the humble tweet an important piece of content that needs careful crafting? If not, you probably should.
As well as standalone golden nuggets of shareable content (when they’re really good), tweets can also drive people to discover your brand elsewhere online.
Twitter currently has “about a billion” users creating over an average of 500 million tweets each day (stats courtesy of Expanded Ramblings). That’s a lot of competition in the battle for attention, let alone engagement.
So, how to ensure that your tweets cut through the noise and – better still –achieve much-coveted re-tweets? We found a super blog over on Shopify rounding up some tips for going viral on Twitter. Here’s a summary of the science of getting retweeted, covering some seemingly straightforward tips and other less-obvious ideas to start applying to your Twitter strategy today.
Use images
On Twitter, it seems, a picture tells a thousand words. Tweets using images are a staggering 94% more likely to be retweeted, especially when uploaded using Twitter’s native uploader. This insight comes courtesy of self-professed Social Media Scientist Dan Zarrella .
Best time to tweet
Around 6% of all retweets happen at around 5pm. When you think about it, it makes sense – people are rounding up their day’s work and checking in to social media. The key takeaway here? Use a tool like Buffer to finely tune the timing of your tweets for maximum impact.
Tweet links…and shorten them
Almost 70% of retweets contain a link, suggesting that people are willing to share tweets that point followers to great content elsewhere on the web. It’s all great news for brands looking to harness Twitter as a content distribution network.
But if you’re linking in your tweet, for goodness sake use a URL shortener. Current favourites among retweeters are bit.ly (winner by far) followed by ow.ly and su.pr.
Use hashtags…properly
Tweets with hashtags get retweeted roughly double the amount of those without. It seems there’s something about hashtags that just makes Twitter users want to engage. But use them sparingly. As soon as you go over four in one tweet, you can expect a drop of almost 4%.
And keep it simple. As a case in point X Factor USA opted for a short and quirky hashtag to differentiate from the UK show (#xfusa). However, the plan backfired when fans ended up tweeting using the non-promoted #xfactor five times more than #xfusa. As a guide, think as a Twitter user rather than as a brand when devising hashtags.
Short is sweet, but not too short
Composing succinct tweets can often pose a challenge. Research by Track Social finds that the ideal tweet length (in retweeting terms) comes in at around 100 characters. Engagement peaks at 110 characters and tails off from there. So, don’t go too brief, but likewise don’t feel you have to max out your character allowance to convey your message well.
Over to you
Have you noticed a pattern in the structure or content of your best-performing, most retweeted tweets? We’d love to hear what works for you.
Image: Webtreats
