Ten Tips to Be ReTweeted

This week I thought it would be helpful to go back to the basics of Twitter ReTweeting. Want to get your tweets retweeted more often? Below are ten tips for just that:

1. Interesting/Entertaining. Tweets with a bit of humor or color to them always have a higher probability of being retweeted. No one wants to spread boring tweets to their followers.
2. Educational. Provide timely and valuable content.
3. Engaging. Be authentic with your community and connect with them. Be social and show that you aren’t just a program with scheduled tweets.
4. Ask for the RT. Sometimes simply asking for the retweet, “Pls RT”, does the trick.
5. Short Tweets. Leave around 25 characters of space in your tweets. Tweets are more likely to be retweeted when it takes less editing to do so.
6. Thank you. Ensure you thank those who do RT your tweets. That sincere thank you might gain those additional retweets. However a note of caution, do not thank others for RTs just for the possibility of a future retweet, be genuine.
7. Useful. Provide information to others that is helpful such as “how tos”, “tips” and “lists”.
8. URL Shorteners. Using services such as bit.ly provides additional tweet real estate as opposed to including full URLs.
9. Social Plugins. Make it easy for others to retweet your content by conveniently placing “retweet” calls to action on your posts.
10. When you tweet. Social Media Scientist, Dan Zarrella, has conducted studies showing the days of the week/times with a higher probability of RT worthiness. Zarrella concluded Fridays yield the highest number of retweets between 3:00pm to midnight.

The above list is not advocating all tweets be designed for retweeting. But for the tweets that you do want to have a viral component to them, designing for the possibility of retweeting is important.

Do you have your own retweet tips to add to the list?

Image credit: Josef Dunne