1. Use an image
Twitter is getting increasingly visual. If you want your tweets to stand out, including images is a surefire way to boost engagement. Adding an image to a tweet can boost engagement by up to 150% and Twitter itself reports that tweets with photos gain 35% more retweets than those without an image.
Tip: If you don’t have a custom image to tweet out and you are just sharing a link, use Twitshot to add images to tweets containing links. This Google Chrome extension allows you to choose from multiple images that appear in the link to share with your tweet. See below.
2. Test different versions of your tweets to compose the perfect one
Researchers at Cornell recently developed an algorithm to figure out the sentence constructions, rhetoric, and keywords that make certain tweets get more attention than other. Their online tool lets you compose two different wordings of the same tweet and weighs them against each other to determine which one will be more popular.
What makes a perfect tweet, according to these researchers?
Using language that is familiar to your target audience and consistent with past tweets, abbreviated headlines, giving a tweet a positive or negative spin, making it easy to read and informative, staying away from first person (using the word “I” cuts down a tweet’s sharing potential by about 50%), and adding the words “please retweet” makes it 95% more likely to be shared, according to the algorithm.
3. Use Video
Twitter recently introduced native videos to their site, allowing users the ability to capture, share and edit videos up to 3-seconds in length by using the camera button directly in the app, just as you do with photos.
This is great for marketing opportunities and for covering a live event. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s CEO said, “We believe that during any sort of local event, national event, global event, the opportunity for people, participants, to be live tweeting those things and broadcasting them to the world is a massive opportunity. That’s one of the reasons we are so excited about consumer video.”
Actor Neil Patrick Harris was the first person to post a video to Twitter using the new native video sharing tool.
