10 Proven Ways to Earn More Retweets on Twitter

By Newsday | Jun. 2, 2014

Have you ever wondered what the science behind earning a retweet is?

Twitter-marketing Well, a team at Microsoft was too when they examined 720,000 tweets over a 6 month period and found that only 3 percent of these tweets were likely to be retweeted.

That’s a very slim figure of content being retweeted, which leads me to ask the following question: what motivates people to retweet?

Here are a few conclusions I have come to:

To spread valuable information to a larger (and potentially new) audience
To provide a source of entertainment to your own social network
To position yourself as an active listener
To show that you publicly agree with someone
To encourage others to retweet your content

If you’ve ever retweeted content before, was it for one of the reasons that I’ve listed above or did you have another motive for doing so?

Understanding what motivates your audience to retweet content is essential for earning more retweets. Once you’ve made this determination, I’d recommend trying this list of 10 proven ways to earn more retweets on Twitter for your business:

Fridays are generally the best day of the week to tweet if you want to earn retweets. This will, of course, depend on your audience, but Fridays will typically allow for the most eyeballs to see your content.
The most powerful time of day to tweet is between 3pm and 11pm, with 10pm to 11pm being the optimal time. People have the tendency to browse through their Twitter feeds before calling it a night, and they will be more likely to retweet content when they have fewer distractions.
Hashtags equal more retweets. According to data compiled by Trackmaven, 5 appears to be the optimal number of hashtags to include to get retweets. Before you get too carried away with hashtagging, though, be sure to read about the most common hashtag mistakes.
Tweet pictures. If you want to capture your audience’s attention on any social media site, high quality images are the best way to do this. This is especially true on Twitter as a picture can say a thousand words in the blink of an eye.
Ask your followers to “retweet” your content, not “RT” it. By using the full word in your request, you are 2.5 times more likely to have your content retweeted. Not everyone is up to speed on the latest social media acronyms.
Retweet other people’s content that you find useful. By taking the time to retweet others’ content, they will be inspired to retweet your meaningful content too. Plus, it shows that not all of your tweets are screaming, “Me! Me! Me!”
Keep your tweets short. You’ve probably heard to not let your tweet exceed 120 characters if you want to make it easy for others to retweet your content. To learn more about this “magic formula,” be sure to see our post about the anatomy of a power tweet.
Thank those that retweet your content. If manageable, it’s ideal to thank each person directly to show appreciation. It’s amazing how a good old fashioned thank you can go a long way in earning you more retweets in the future!
Use bit.ly to shorten links. This makes it easier for your followers to retweet your content. On a side note, competing link shortner tinyurl is retweeted the least.
Pay attention to grammar. According to “Social Media Scientist” Dan Zarrella, 93 percent of retweets use proper punctuation. This makes sense, too, because people are not going to want to retweet content that makes them look uneducated or stupid.

So, if you read through these 10 proven tactics for earning more retweets, you will see that many of them are obvious, and certainly none of them are rocket science.

We’re interested to hear what’s worked for you (and what hasn’t) when it comes to earning retweets. Do you currently embrace any of the tactics that I’ve mentioned above?