Social media “scientist” and researcher, Dan Zarrella, compiled a dataset of more than 200,000 link-containing Tweets tracking the CTR (click-through rates) in order to determine what words, phrases and characters correlate with higher(or lower) CTR. Below is a quick summary of his findings.
7 Things to Tweet:
#: The first “word” he analyzed was the hashtag. He found that there is an insignificant difference in the CTR of a link with a hashtag than one without. The hashtags don’t make much of a difference in the CTRs.
“daily is out”: He discovered that Tweets that contained the words “daily is out” (which is the signature of the paper.li automated Tweets) had much higher CTRs than Tweets that did not. Revealing that paper.li works, at least for driving clicks.
“via”: He also found that Tweets using the word “via” as a method of ReTweeting had a higher CTR.
@-mentions: Tweets specifically directed at a person tend to have a higher CTR since we are much more likely to pay attention to a Tweet if it’s sent to us. He assumes this is probably the reason the paper.li Tweets do so well, they tend to contain 3 @-mentions.
“RT”: Like the “via” ReTweeting syntax, Tweets with “RT” in them had a higher CTR than those that did not.
“Please”: His data seems to indicate that when you politely ask people to do something, like a nice social call-to-action, they’re likely to do it.
“Check out”: Specifically asking readers to check out a link seems to result in a higher CTR than not doing that.
3 Things to NOT Tweet:
“@addthis”: Which is a signature for the Tweets that come from the automated AddThis sharing functionality.
“Marketing”: Tweets that mention the word marketing have a lower CTR than Tweets that don’t mention it.
@getglue: The automated Tweets that come from the GetGlue system have a lower CTR than Tweets that don’t come from that system.
