How to: Make your tweets more popular

In the age of social, we’re all looking to make our tweets fly higher and higher, and researchers at Cornell University may well have cracked the viral code for tweeting success.

A study, backed by the National Science Foundation and Google, found that style may trump substance when it comes to your Twitter’s popularity.

The study explored what makes certain tweets get more attention than others using an algorithm to analyse the sentence constructions, rhetoric and keywords.

What was born was this online tool, which pits two different wordings of the same tweet together – and works out a percentage change of which would be more popular.

So what ingredients combine to create the perfectly viral tweet?

 

Be polite and ask for a retweet

The Cornell boffins found that politely asking followers to retweet content works. Adding the words “please,” “pls,” or “plz,” with “retweet” makes a tweet 95% more likely to be shared.

The words “please retweet” alone score a 85% uplift in share.

 

Stay familiar

Tweeters should also stick to a consistent use of language and style from past tweets that is familiar to the target audience, using acronyms they will understand.

 

Stay away from making it about you

Adding the word “I” to an otherwise identical phrase seems to cut down on a tweet’s sharing potential by about 50%.