If you use Twitter, you know how important retweets are. If you don’t, retweets are the equivalent of a Facebook user sharing an update with all their friends.
And like your website and your Facebook Page, call-to-actions can dramatically increase results.
Dan Zarrella, of HubSpot, analyzed the use of call-to-actions for 2.7 million Tweets, using a retweets-per-follower ratio. Dan discovered seven phrases that correlated with more retweets:
Here’s what we can take away from this list:
- Saying “Please” increases your chances of getting retweeted by 60%. So your mother was right.
- Telling people to retweet your Tweet increases your chances of getting retweeted by 90%.
- Doing both increases your chances of getting retweeted by 150%.
Does this mean you should include “Please Retweet” in every single tweet? Of course not! But when you do want followers to retweet something, adding “Please Retweet” will help.
Influence, Interest, and Retweets
I’d love to see Dan look at Klout scores as another factor in the retweet CTA research, since influential Twitter users have an easier time getting retweets. Even better is the influential user within a specific community.