Dan Zarrella has written an interesting post about what makes a tweet more likely to get re-tweeted. There’s lots of fun data in there, as well as an impressive algorithm or two, but here’s the crux of the advice:
- Ask your followers to re-tweet you
- Be timely with breaking “new” news
- Offer something for free
- Tweet about Twitter
- Make a list (perhaps he means “top 10 something”?)
- People like to re-tweet blog posts
Dan says you’re more likely to get re-tweeted if you say “please” in your tweet. Really. And also if you include a link, which it seems that most tweets do. He also says that most re-tweets occur around lunch time.
I’m going to experiment with the advice and see if they work. There are some good tools for tracking re-tweets and trends on Twitter, including: