A recent addition to the herd here at Cow is Louise Doherty, who joined us from Fubra.com, a network of 100 odd price comparison websites.
The other day, a post Louise wrote in February on getting re-tweeted got picked up by Robin Broitman in an article on writing effectively for twitter and the social web. So I've now included a summary of Louise's piece here:
Running three Twitter accounts I noticed a common theme in retweeted tweets. I've condensed my observations into a formula:
140 - (username + 5) x interestingness = probability of RT
Ok, so it's not totally mathematical - I do words not numbers - but it basically means that to increase your chances of being retweeted you only need to do two things:
- Keep your tweet short - All tweets must be less than 140 characters, but to be retweeted you need to allow space for an '@' symbol, your username, the letters 'RT', and 2 spaces (one after RT and one after your username).
- Say something interesting - No one will retweet you just because they can, you also need to have something interesting to say! People should actively want to pass it on, because they've found it funny, informative or useful.
Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, is the best example of this in action. The majority of his tweets are under 127 characters (the maximum length he can tweet to enable people to retweet him, given the length of his username) and he tweets about 'all that's new on the web' - a subject the technologically enlightened Twittersphere clearly finds interesting.
He's retweeted several hundred times a day, as you can see from Retweetist.com - a site which ranks Twitter users based on the number of times they are retweeted.
There are of course other factors at play (the time you tweet, the number of followers you have, how much your followers respect or like you, to name a few) but by sticking to the formula above you will almost certainly increase your chances of being retweeted.
Try it out - and if you find this post useful feel free to retweet it! (or better yet, follow Louise on Twitter here)
- Search by Sentiment: RankSpeed Gives Users a New Tool to Filter Results (readwriteweb.com)
- Tag Twitter Users in Your Facebook Status Updates With SocialToo (mashable.com)
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