Blog Archives
How to Ask for Help On Twitter (Please Read This!)
It’s well known that if you ask people to retweet something on Twitter they’re more likely to do so than if you don’t ask. But exactly how much more likely has never been quantified before.
Step forward Hubspot’s Dan Zarella, author of The Science of Marketing, and a huge dataset from social update scheduler Buffer.
Dan analysed common calls to action featured in over 2.7million tweets to gauge what impact they have on recipients. While I should urge a little caution given the slightly skewed nature of the data (Buffer users tends to be more sophisticated social media players than the average) the findings are still pretty impressive.
As I’ve shown before, sometimes the littlest changes can have the biggest impact. So, here are the Top Seven Best Performing Calls To Action from Dan’s study:
1. Please Help – this simple, human plea generates more than 160% more retweets than the average tweet. Evidence, if it were ever needed, that social media is all about people helping other people.
2. Please Retweet – the old favourite solicits around 130% more retweets than average, still a great performer.
3. Please RT – interestingly for a shorthand world limited to just 140 characters, abbreviating Retweet to RT leads to 30% drop in retweets received! But ‘Please RT’ will still bring in around 90% more RTs than the average tweet so remains popular amongst the Twitter elite.
4. Please – OK, so this word may not always relate to an overt call to action but your mum was right: a little politeness goes a long way bringing home more than 70% more retweets than average.
5 Retweet – if you’re too cool to be polite, this one word still helps elicit over 50% more retweets than average.
6. Spread – we’re in the long grass now, but tweets featuring the word ‘spread’ still manage to attract over 30% more tweets than average
7. Visit – last on our hit list, the word ‘visit’ brings a tiny retweet uplift of around 15% over the average tweet. Not to be sniffed at perhaps, but a long way from the 160% boost at the top of our list.
So now you know which phrases are most likely to encourage your followers to retweet your content. But when and how often should you use these calls to action?
Clearly, if you beg for a retweet every time you post, your followers are likely to lose interest before very long. Instead I recommend you save your pleas for those times when you really need some help, maybe once or twice a week at most, depending on your activity levels. There are no hard and fast rules, but ask yourself what it must feel like to be on the receiving end of your tweets. If your Sent Tweets starts to look a bit like a charity fundraiser, you might be overdoing it. A little moderation will greatly increase your impact when the time comes to ask for those retweets.
And it almost goes without saying, it’s far better to focus on providing high quality content that your followers will spontaneously want to pass on than to force feed them rubbish they feel obliged to pass on to satisfy your constant requests for their help. Great content always generates the greatest response, even when you don’t ask for it.
How to infographicise your Twitter profile
Is this useful or not? Probably not, but it’s harmless, good fun.
A tool from Visual.ly allows you to “Twitterize Yourself!”, essentially creating a near-instant infographic of your Twitter persona.
Quite what you’ll do with the resulting diagram I’m not sure. Maybe impress your mum or print it out to stick above your desk to convince any naysayers of your awesome social media powers.
Or you could do like me and ponder what you’ve done to only achieve “17.82% interestingness” before concluding that even answering that question is unlikely to improve my score!
What do you make of this tool? Any practical uses you can uncover?
(And here, for my mum, is my full profile)
Measuring the half-life of your links
Understanding the concept of the “half-life” of different types of online links is important.
“Half-life” a term most often associated with measuring radioactive decay where it helps describe:
“the period of time is takes for the amount of a substance undergoing decay to decrease by half.”
(source: Wikipedia)
In digital marketing terms the ‘substance’ we’re interested in measuring is usually impressions or clicks.
And the half-life of an advert helps describe how long it takes for the ad to receive half of the engagement it will ever get.
In the pre-digital era, the half life of, say, a TV advert used to be roughly half the duration of the paid ad campaign. Because we were buying share of voice, we could control the half-life and set it to a point where our presence in the marketplace would be at its peak.
Things are different online though, where the impact of a new message is at its highest when the content is new and fresh, and quickly dissipates to (close to) nothing, sometimes in a matter of hours.
According to data from Bit.ly:
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A link shared on Twitter has a half-life of 2.8 hours
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A link shared on Facebook has a slightly longer half-life of 3.2 hours
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A link shared through email or IM has a half-life of 3.4 hours
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A link shared through YouTube has a half-life of 7.4 hours
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A link shared on StumbleUpon has a half life of around 400 hours (because StumbleUpon will automatically recycle content until it has achieved the desired viewing levels if part of a paid ad campaign, or until the content is no longer receiving positive feedback from its viewers if part of an unpaid activity.)
How to measure the half-life of your links?
You can easily measure the half-life of any link you share. At the simplest level, using a URL shortening service like Bit.ly gives you access to analytics data reported by the hour so you can quickly see how many hits you get and when. You’ll need to do some number juggling to calculate the half life but in most instances a quick glance at the last 24 hours chart should be enough to tell you roughly when the half-life was reached. The big downside of this manual approach is you have to move fast. Without customised tools, the free Bit.ly Analytics site only reports data for the last 24 hours, so if you shared your link last week it could be impossible to gauge the half-life accurately.
And remember, you can only truly measure half-life when all clicks have been received, which is, in theory, at a point in the infinite future. You need to make a call when clicks have dwindled sufficiently for you to ignore all future clicks (the long tail) and make your calculations. To help decide when is the right time to make this call, take a look at long-term clicks for a link shared a few months ago. In most instances, engagement will have dried up after a few days in which case it’s fine to calculate the half-life from that point in time.
But how does this knowledge help you?
By knowing the relative half-life of content shared on different platforms you can determine how frequently to post to those channels or when to post (and repost) to achieve maximum impact. This knowledge can also help inform your paid advertising plans helping you align them with activity happening across social channels to achieve maximum impact.
Let me know how you get on calculating your links’ half-life levels or contact me with any questions. I’d love to hear how you get on.
Anything is possible if you put your mind to it
The creative opportunities available on social networking sites never cease to amaze me.
Take Twitter for example. We all know there’s no way to place animated content on a user’s Twitter homepage, don’t we?
Except you can. If you use a bit of left brain thinking and can find someone with the patience of a saint (or a savvy web developer) to bring a clever visual idea to life.
Don’t believe me?
Visit
https://twitter.com/#!/smartarg
and scroll down (or just press the letter ‘J’ on your keyboard) to see how Smart Car in Argentina is using their Twitter page in a quite unexpected way.
See! Anything’s possible on the social web when you put your mind to it.
[hat tip to @TravelMan for sending this my way]
One Way To Get Retweeted: “Act Normal”
I enjoyed reading Pam Moore’s latest article on Social Media Today that lists 55 ways to get retweeted. But what struck me most was that nearly all of the tips relate to one simple principle: “be a nice human being”. Sure, there are some techniques like sharing ‘how to’ advice that often work well but, as a general rule, your tweets are more likely to be appreciated and retweeted by others if you behave like a genuine, authentic, real person.
You see, Twitter is just one place that people go to have an online conversation and although you may have only 140 characters to play with, the types of things we like and don’t like are the same as in other conversation in our daily lives. So, if you really want to be heard and valued by others, quit trying to be someone you’re not, find your own voice and start “acting normal” again.
You can read Pam’s 55 tips here.
