Tweeting is easy and yes, it can be fun. That’s probably why 500 million tweets circle the globe each day, creating lots of tweet pollution and lots of chances to get lost in the mix. But Twitter also provides lots of opportunities to reach your followers and lots of ways to engage new audiences – with a retweet.
The folks at Twitter did extensive research over a one-month period on what things increase your retweet power and based on the results of 2 million tweets, here’s what they found: add photos, videos, quotes, numbers/stats and hashtags. (See chart below for percentages.)
Regarding timing, the best time to tweet for maximum retweet potential is 5 p.m. ET, according to KISSmetrics. About 6% of all retweets happen during afternoon rush hour. (The worst time: around 6 a.m.)
As far as length, 100 characters seems to be the optimum. Buddy Media has done research in this area and says retweets will increase by 17% if they are limited to 100 characters. This might be because shorter tweets allow retweeters extra character space to write their own intro blurb.
Dan Zarrella is a social media scientist at HubSpot and his research on retweet power breaks it down even more. His science says to use photos to give you the most retweet bang and also says photos uploaded using pic.Twitter.com are much more likely to be retweeted. (See chart below for percentages.) Photos with a link to another site, such as Facebook or Instagram, are significantly less likely to be retweeted.
Since photos seems to be the accompaniment of choice, here are a couple of guidelines. You can use jpeg, gif or png files up to 5MB and animated gif files must be 3MB or less. And although Twitter says they will resize the photos, Constant Contact recommends an image size of 880×440.
So, if you’re looking to get your tweets forwarded around, log on to Twitter around 5 p.m. and type something profound in 100 characters or less with your photo uploaded via pic.Twitter.com!
And while we’re on the subject of Twitter, please join The Marketing Mojo Show‘s live Twitter chat today at 1 p.m., @lgkmarketing, #mymarketingmojo, where the topic will be Webmaster by Default: Maintenance Musts for Your Small Biz Site.
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