This tool could make your tweets more popular

Style may trump substance when it comes to Twitter popularity, according to researchers at Cornell University.

A study backed by the National Science Foundation and Google used an algorithm to parse the sentence constructions, rhetoric and keywords that makes certain tweets get more attention than others.

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.

The researchers used Twitter because it was the easiest platform to set up a controlled experiment, but they are hoping the results will apply to other forms of communication as well.

“We’re looking at persuasion everywhere,” Lillian Lee, a computer science and information science professor at Cornell, said in a press release.

So what makes for a perfect tweet? According to researchers, politely asking followers to retweet can go a long way. Including the words “please,” “pls,” “plz” and “retweet” topped the list of factors that make up a successful tweet.

Adding the words “please retweet” to an otherwise identical message in the popularity calculator seems to make a tweet around 95% more likely to be shared, according to the algorithm. Indeed, just the words “please retweet” by themselves seem to have an 85% chance of sharing better than any other text.

 

twittertest

 

IMAGE:  SCREENSHOT

 

Other strategies for success include using language that is familiar to the target audience and consistent with past tweets, as well as mimicking the abbreviated style of headline writers.

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%.

The tool isn’t infallible, of course. For one thing, it equates the length of tweet with how informative it is — so tacking on an extra word at random will usually make the algorithm think the tweet is around 50% more retweetable.

 

twittertest2

 

IMAGE:  SCREENSHOT

 

Also, the researchers admit one glaring drawback in the research: Their machine has yet to master a sense of humor. “We would love to capture amusingness or cleverness, but we haven’t found a way to do that yet,” Lee said in a press release.

The website also offers a quiz where you can test your Twitter skills by guessing the more shared tweet.

Share This Post
Have your say!
00

Leave a Reply