A passionate believer in the power of re-Tweeting, I spent a worthwhile half hour today reviewing Dan Zarellas “Science of Re-Tweets” presentation (below). It’s well worth a look and, for a bit of fun, I’ve extracted seven things you probably never knew about re-Tweets in my analysis below. Enjoy!
1) The fascinating list of the top 10 most re-Tweetable words indicates to me that the call to action “please re-Tweet” does actually work (who’d have thought it). It also suggests that links to “blog posts” as well as things that are “free” and “social” tend to get passed on – which all makes a lot of sense. Requests for “help” also encourage a response, which you would probably expect. All in all, this looks to be a useful set of signposting words.
- You
- Please
- Re-Tweet
- Post
- Blog
- Social
- Free
- Media
- Help
2) Conversely, the list of top 10 least re-Tweetable words is a mixture of throwaway comments (”lol”, “haha”), a couple of actions (”going”, “watching”) and the fundamentals of everyday life (”Home”, “Work”, “Night”, “Bed”). To many, these words are the primary constituents of the millions of tedious Tweets that clog up the Internet. To others they may indicate the more social side of Twitter, where interaction is as valuable as information exchange. You decide!
- Game
- Going
- Haha
- lol
- But
- Watching
- Work
- Home
- Night
- Bed
3) When we get into the detail, I found it interesting that re-Tweets use both longer words, a greater variety of words and more punctuation than Tweets. Again, this would indicate that more erudite, interesting Tweets are being passed on and that – since there are multiple clauses within the 140 characters – more information is being conveyed in a highly succinct manner.
4) Another fascinating fact (though also an obvious one when you think about it) is that re-Tweets are more conceptual and less emotional than Tweets. This matches in with the general point above that “me journalism” doesn’t carry, whereas facts and figures invite further communication.
5) As if to hammer this point home, we discover that re-Tweets have only 50% the number of self-references as Tweets. This stands to reason. It’s much harder to re-Tweet a sentence that refers to “me” or “I”, unless your followers also know that person well, which often isn’t the case.
6) In terms of timing, the number of Tweets that are re-tweeted increases from a low of 2% at 9am to a high of 6% at 5pm. That surprised me because I figured most people did much of their Tweeting first thing in the morning at work – but perhaps I’m thinking of the wrong demographic. Twitter users are getting younger – so perhaps this late activity is due to school kids hanging out after class. I’d welcome any insights into this one – comments please!
7) The final point I extracted from the presentation is that the likelihood of a tweet being re-Tweeted increases dramatically each time it is re-Tweeted. It makes sense that high quality,viral content will continue to be shared but, as Dan Zarella points out, this could also be partly down to the “RT” text in the message giving an obvious call to action. It might be worth experimenting to see if, by adding those two letters to your Tweet, it’s gets passed on more – but far be it from me to suggest gaming the system :)
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