Retweeting, or “RT,” is one of the most commonly used commands in Twitter. Basically, to retweet is to share someone else’s post with one’s own Twitter community or network. Having a post retweeted is recognized as a huge complement as it increases your reputation, and boosts search engine optimization (SEO).
For social media marketing experts and search engine optimization users, here are some tips to be successfully retweeted:
- Viral and social media marketing specialist Dan Zarrella has proven that including links in your tweets is a great way to get retweeted. 56.69% of retweets contain links. Links offer your followers a direct path to the source, increasing your credibility and reputation.
- Because of Twitter’s 140-character limitation, you should shorten links with bit.ly and ow.ly. Both url shorteners provide tracking, history, and Twitter account preferences.
- Leave enough characters to be successfully retweeted. Give sufficient room for your followers to retweet. Keep in mind that retweets often include the username of the original user, so allow at least enough space for that.
- People are always curious about what things look like. Draw people in by incorporating images in tweets. Successfully leading users to the image being discussed guarantees a boost in being successfully retweeted.
- In the world of search engine optimization (SEO), the use of key words and phrases cannot be stressed enough. Some commonly used keywords to get retweeted are “you”, “Twitter”, “please”, “retweet”, and “social media.”
- Post interesting, original, and breaking news. By giving followers interesting tweets, they will be more likely to share your tweets with others. Avoid “game”, “going”, “haha”, “lol”, and “hey.” These are often useless words. Furthermore, tweets should be brief yet attractive enough for followers to retweet them.
- Punctuation marks matter. Tweets usually incorporate periods, commas, colons, and exclamation points, etc., but statistics show that the semicolon (;) is essentially “the least unretweetable punctuation mark”, says Zarrella.
- Twitter is a highly intellectual microblogging site. Social media marketing experts and other businessmen use Twitter, so by using words with longer syllables and characters, you trust that your followers can understand your message. Avoid emoticons and abbreviations.
- Friday is when the most important tweets are posted. Additionally, posting afterhours is also an effective time to get your message across.