For those who don't know about linkbait:There are some copywriters and internet marketers who focus on Linkbait... examples include:"Ooh I wanna RT @briancarter!"
Check out Problogger's 20 Linkbait Techniques, good stuff.
That's what all the girls say.
The format for a retweet is either
- retweet @briancarter Something really cool Brian just tweeted!
- RT @briancarter Something really cool Brian just tweeted!
I'm not a guy who does this stuff intentionally- some people do it very intentionally, and it's kind of manipulative. I'm an idea guy... some of my ideas just turn out to be more viral than others. I was actually surprised how much my stuff was getting retweeted. Some get sphunn, dugg, stumbled, linked, and retweeted more than others.
I wanted to look at some recent retweeting to examine the virality of tweets in particular. What tweets get retweeted more? Is there any pattern?
This came to my attention because, after getting about 1,500 twitter followers, I started seeing a lot of retweets in my search.twitter.com ORM...
24 hours of retweets of my stuff to the right -->I even saw retweets of retweets by people who weren't following me. Wow. THAT's a viral tweet.
In addition to search and social media, I do comedy, and I tweet a lot, so chances are, someone's going to find a tweet of mine useful or funny and retweet it. But what gets retweeted the most?
You can measure that in
- Number of retweets
- Clicks displayed by an url tracking service like zi.ma; when people retweet your zi.ma link, you see a much higher number of clicks on that url.
The 7 Biggest Determinants of Retweeting Virality:Not an exhaustive list, just what I saw in my sample.
1. Linkbait blog posts: Appeal of the associated blog post or link is critical - in reality, Twitter may only potentiate the power of the linkbait it points to.
2. Repetition: Tweeting about it multiple times helps only to a point- there is likely a maximum number of times you should retweet yourself to get more exposure (people are on a different times anyway, so this is ethical) but to avoid annoying followers- I'd say three to four times max.
But often I only really want to tweet something once. In that case, it better point to something cool.
If you want to get clever about this (and I have before) you can take a top 10 list, and tweet point by point over a number of hours- e.g. tweet the #10, then later tweet the #9, etc.
3. Enlistment: Involvement of another person in linked content will get them to retweet- for example, people who are in are took photos you're tweeting about.
Voting either via social bookmarking site or contest on your blog increases involvement and thus chances of pass-along. The 2008 TwitterStache Awards got a lot of response and retweeting because it was not only funny but involved people by requiring their opinion and vote.
4. Reflexive Topics: Here I mean reflexive in the narcissistic sense- Tweeting about Twitter, Digging posts about Digg, and Sphinning posts about Sphinn all work very well because the topic is obviously of interest to the entire audience.
I don't use Digg much, though it's the best known social voting site. I've been thinking about taking the Digg badge off this site because of recent changes on Digg- the value of its traffic has long been debated, and their banning of many power users has led to doubt about its future value, period.5. Fan Behavior: Involvement of people popular to a niche gets all their fans to retweet.
For example, a post on Sphinn about Matt Cutts or Rand Fishkin may not stimulate entirely positive comments, but do they tend to get quite a few of them.
6. Hot Topics: Evergreen topics are great (e.g. anything Google) as well as news, holidays... my Twitter Halloween post, which came out on Halloween, did quite well compared to other tweeted posts).
7. Humor: So many of my tweets are meant to be funny, and get retweeted with LOL's. I'm planning to write more about how much humor helps you in social media and social networking, so stay tuned.
--
That's about it- but if you're a programmer, contact me- I have some ideas for something very cool involving twitter and retweets... in fact, it's a linkbait thing we could both benefit from. :-)
