Dan Zarella & The Science of ReTweets

Dan Zarella from Hubspot recently presented a superb study he has completed on the Science of ReTweets, and how they can be usefully be applied in a marketing context. He gathered data from over 100,000,000 (yes, that really is 100 million!) tweets and found some interesting and startling patterns.

What follows is a pithy summary of his webinar – if you are busy, you can access his slides at the end of this article.

So, what is the Science of ReTweets, and why is it so important to know about it from a marketing perspective?

The simple answer is this: if you know how to maximize the reTweeting of your posts, then your message is far more likely to reach the widest possible audience. Dan is a marketer himself, however, and he shares more in the webinar about how you can take advantage of the knowledge he has gained to turn such a process into the raving fans your business needs as its lifeblood.

What follows  are some highlights from Dan’s webinar – but I highly recommend that you watch the webinar in full if you want to take things further, as I’m just giving you some of the cream of what Dan shared – and you should grab the milk as well, for a more complete “diet”.

I deliberately haven’t reproduced all 28 findings, as that wouldn’t be fair on Dan’s hard work, or HubSpot, who had to pay significantly to get this data.  Instead, you should watch the webinar, or at least look at the slides below.

Finally, when you’ve done that, I highly recommend that you download HubSpot’s free guide here: The Twitter for Business Marketing Kit. (That’s not an affiliate link by the way, though I really ought to become an affiliate, as they are a terrific company).

1) What is The Most ReTweeted Time?

3-7pm EST, with a peak at around 5pm EST.

2) Which is the most Re-Tweet Day?

Friday afternoons.

3) What is the Best Type of Content to ReTweet?

News!

4) What is the Most Popular URL Shortner?

Bit.ly

5) What are the 10 Most ReTweeted Words?

1. you
2. twitter
3. please
4. retweet
5. post
6. blog
7. social
8. free
9. media
10. help

(Dan produced data on the top 20 – you’ll have to flick through the slides below to see the rest!).

Top-Tips Summary of things you can do to encourage ReTweets

(you can read the original article here).

Run a contest If you have some sort of contest or incentive, you can help stimulate more retweets.

Use words like “Pls RT”, “Please RT” or “Please ReTweet” in your original tweet.

Tweet about Twitter Yes, this still works.

Include a Link. ReTweets contain links far more often than Tweets in general.

Create value, don’t chit chat.

Tweet headlines. Headline-type language seems to be ReTweeted more often.

Post in the afternoon.

Post on Fridays.

Dan Zarella’s webinar in slide format: