Wednesday, June 15, 2011

How to get retweeted

If you would like some of your tweets to be retweeted, there are -- in my book -- 3 simple rules:

1. make them good;
2. make them short; and
3. be a retweeter yourself.

If you have to ask people to retweet you, it's because you're not doing a good enough job at (1), (2), and (3).

As to what I mean by "good", there's no simple rule, but studies have shown that tweets with links to substantive content are more likely to be retweeted than those without.

And as to keeping them short, studies have shown that using shorter URL shorteners like is.gd rather than longer ones like tinyurl will increase the likelihood of getting retweeted too.

And to those of you who feel it's wasteful if you fail to use up all 140 characters every time you tweet... it's not.

(PS, if you want to know "How to get unfollowed", one good way is to send a DM to someone whom you rarely, or never, retweet, asking them to retweet something of yours.)

(Short URL for this post: http://is.gd/cUAym)

8 comments:

  1. You need to add:

    d) hope you're not being followed by introspective self-promoting people.

    ReplyDelete
  2. yes, what stuart said above! just learned this yesterday.

    eish.

    ~annie

    ReplyDelete
  3. Truly introspective people are never self promoting.

    Self promoting people might be deluded into thinking they are introspective.

    Introspective has nothing to do with being self involved.

    ReplyDelete
  4. No surprise, Ray, you also censor comments~anyone ever call you a control freak? Wowser ...Bill

    ReplyDelete
  5. Haha, Ray, your reply to Bill made me laugh :D Thanks for the tips, I'm completely a Twitter n00b, I've had an account for awhile but rarely touch it... I'm changing that now, and any information that I get helps!

    ReplyDelete
  6. I try to keep my tweets short so that if they're retweeted, the person has some characters to add their own comment.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Good post. Gems in the comments too.

    My own practice is to not "thank" people for RT & mentions but to dig into their streams to catch up and when find value, RT.

    In terms of unfollow - might I add my pet peeve? The professional #FF - whose stream is constant with low value attaboys (to the tune of 10+ #FF in a row)

    ReplyDelete

I have a few simple comment rules:

(a) No

1. rudeness
2. falsehood
3. deception
4. unfair tactics
5. comment spam
6. shilling or trolling

(b) stay on topic, and

(c) if you're anonymous, use a handle so we can distinguish you from other anonymous commenters.

Thanks for commenting.

Ray