Asking to Retweet

A new study done by researchers at Cornell University is looking into why one tweet with the same sentence constructions, rhetoric and keywords that makes certain tweets get more attention than others. A study backed by the National Science Foundation and Google used an algorithm to parse the sentence By using an algorithm to phrase the sentence, the researchers used their findings to create an online tool that weighs two wordings of the same tweet against each other and spits out a percentage chance that one is likely to be more popular than the other. Controlling for the popularity of the user and the subject matter of the tweets, the study’s authors collected thousands of pairs of tweets across many different accounts and analyzed the number of shares in relation to key phrases, online communities reached and other factors. So what made some tweet more popular that others.  Asking politely for your tweet to be retweeted.  Using the word “please” went a long way according to the researchers.  Including the words “please,” “pls,” “plz” and “retweet” were big factors that were used to make up a successful tweet. The research found by adding the words “please retweet” to an otherwise identical message seemed to make a tweet around 95% more likely to be shared, according to the algorithm. The study also recommends giving a tweet a positive or negative spin, making it easy to read and informative and staying away from the first person. Adding the word “I” to an otherwise identical phrase seems to cut down on a tweet’s sharing potential by about 50%. Source: Mashable