Simple and Powerful Ways to Get More Retweets on Twitter, 2018 hot tricks

Twitter offers a great way to extend your influence online: the retweet.

When used wisely, retweets often lead to more influence, more followers, and more web traffics. According to Statistic Brain, there are over 550 million active Twitter users as of April 2018, 58 million new tweets daily, and 135,000 new Twitter users every day.

What are all these people doing on Twitter? This infographic clearly shows that a big chunk of them are using Twitter (as well as other social media platforms) to learn about business brands/products/services.

Your potential reach on Twitter is huge. So is your competition. There are hundreds of thousands of other marketers just like you, competing for attention in the Twitter space.

Sharing good information and writing bold headlines are vital in winning the tweet-retweet war, but to maximize your odds, there are several other factors to consider.

1) Be a retweeter

You need to build good social media karma before you can receive. So if you want people to retweet you, start demonstrating your’re a generous retweeter yourself.

2) Use hashtags

According to Buffer, tweets with hashtags get two times more engagement than tweets without.

3) Add mentions

Including a mention (an @TwitterName) increases engagement as it gives people something to click on. In Twitter ads, a mention can get you 23% more clicks.

4) Include links

If you want to increase the chance of a tweet getting retweeted by as much as 86%, add a link to it.

5) Think about where you place your link

Most people add a link to the end of their tweet. But apparently if you really want to maximise your engagement, you’ll add it 90% of the way through your tweet.

6) Add an image

According to Dan Zarella from Hubspot, if you add an image to a tweet it’s 94% more likely to be retweeted.

7) Make a point!

Dan Zarella also found out that tweets with exclamation points encouraged more retweets (but interestingly, led to fewer clicks).

8) Retweet retweeters

Often the easiest way to thank someone for retweeting you is to repay the favour. So keep the goodwill going by retweeting those who have retweeted you.

9) Make your tweets interesting

Dan Zarella compiled a report of the 20 least retweetable words on Twitter. These words include:

watching
work
home
night
bed
sleep
tired
bored
listening
haha
hey

Notice anything special about them? As Dan points out in his analysis, these are more casual words that we use in tweets about our mundane every day activities. Words that are likely to appear in tweets like these:

At home watching TV
Tired – time for bed!
Hey, I’m bored! Time to leave work

So if you want people to notice and engage with your tweets, make it worth their while and avoid tweeting about the dull details of your everyday life.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t tweet about what you’re doing… you just need to ensure it’s relevant and interesting to your ideal followers, and actually adds something to their Twitter feed.

10) Use retweetable language

Dan also handily compiled a list of the 20 most retweetable words. Here they are:

you
twitter
please
retweet
post
blog
social
free
media
help
please retweet
great
social media
10
follow
how to
top
blog post
check out
new blogpost

Print out this list and try to use them when you can when tweeting (but naturally – don’t just cram them in without relevance) to increase your chances of retweets.

11) Ask for retweets

There’s a good reason why “please retweet” makes the list above. Why? Because if you actually ask for a retweet, people are 12 times more likely to do it. So as simple as it may seem, if you want people to retweet you, make sure you ask them!

12) Spell it out

It’s not just asking for a retweet that can boost your engagement, but how you ask. And according to research, spelling out the word ‘retweet’ gets more engagement than just using the abbreviation RT.

13) Tweet quotes

Inspirational quotes are always popular on Twitter. So, if you’re looking for an easy way to get more retweets, find some quotes that you know your Twitter followers will resonate with and tweet them. You can either tweet the quotes as words, or create a visual from a quote using an online graphics tool like Canva (and ticking off the quote and the image boxes in encouraging retweets).

14) Don’t use every character

You may have 280 characters to play with in Twitter, but don’t feel you need to use all of them. When you only had 140 characters available, the optimum length of a tweet was around 100 characters (it varies from expert to expert, but this seems to be a good mean average). We can’t find any recent updates on this, but certainly recommend keeping tweets shorter where you can.

15) Schedule tweets

You can’t be on Twitter every minute of the day – after all you have a business to run and life to lead. You also need to sleep! So use an automation tool to schedule tweets for when you think your customers are online but you’re not.

16) Be live

That said, a Twitter feed that’s obviously completely automated isn’t very inspiring – and makes it hard for people and businesses to feel a real connection with you. So mix your automated activity with live tweeting and engagement, and show that you’re a real, live interesting and interested person or business.

17) Be interesting

We’ve already warned you against being dull on Twitter. But it’s not enough just to not be dull; if you want great engagement on Twitter you need to be interesting. And that means ensuring you share content and write tweets your ideal audience are interested in.

18) Make it easy for fans to retweet your content

If you have content on your site you’d like people to retweet, make it easy for them and have an obvious button to retweet.

19) Find your perfect time

There’s been plenty of research into the perfect times of the day and week to tweet for maximum engagement. But the end of the day you need to find out what works for your audience – then use that information to tweet accordingly.

So by all means research the optimum times for your type of business, but also monitor your tweets’ performance over a period of a time to understand when you’re getting more retweeting and engagement on Twitter.

20) Include a number

According to Twitter, tweets that contain a number get 17% more retweets than those that are number-less. What kind of numbers? It doesn’t matter! Stats, lists and even sports scores all count.

21) Use video

Tweets with videos apparently get 28% more retweets.

22) USE CAPITALS

According to research by a company called TrackMaven, tweets with capital letters are more likely to get retweets. BUT DON’T SHOUT ALL THE TIME! We recommend using capital letters sparingly for effect.

23) Say thank you

Want to encourage a retweeter to repeat the favour? Thank them! Knowing you’re appreciated is more likely to encourage them to do it again in future. Plus it’s just nice.

24) Tweet content people love

If you want someone to retweet your content, make sure you share things they love. This includes news, educational content, opinion and products.

25) Speak the right language

If you want peole to connect with your tweets (or even just understand them!) make sure you tweet in the right language. And we don’t just mean English or Spanish, but the phrases, vocabulary and abbreviations your audience is more likely to use.

Want to increase ALL your Twitter results?

Retweets are fantastic, but they’re just one tiny part of being successful on Twitter. You also need to:

Make sure your profile is completed correctly.
Identify your ideal followers and know how to build them.
Plan a profesional Twitter strategy.
Know how to write tweets your followers will love (and click on).
Understand how to use Twitter as a sales tool.
Use hashtags properly.
Get the right balance between automation and live engagement.

And most of all you need to be clear about exactly how Twitter benefits your business, and ensure that your efforts in growing your following and tweeting are repaid by greater brand awareness and sales.

You need to know (and do) ALL this if you want to increase your Twitter results, and make your time on Twitter worth the effort.

Turn Twitter into a powerful sales tool

Luckily, this is really easy when you sign up to Twitter Tune-up, our online Twitter course for small businesses and freelancers.

Twitter Tune-up includes everything you need to turn Twitter into a powerful sales tool, and not just get more retweets, but improve all your Twitter results – and grow your business.

Twitter Tune-up is a practical course, which means you’ll start seeing results virtually immediately once you start implementing our techniques. We even teach you how to grow your following and increase your results while spending just half an hour a day on the site.

And with lifelong access to the content, you can return to the lessons and tools inside Twitter Tune-up whenever you need a refresh.

So what are you waiting for? If you’re ready to start seeing more results from Twitter – including retweets! – join Twitter Tune-up now and turn it into the powerful sales tool it should be for you.

Here are the collections of my experiences and online studies.