There’s a lot to learn from just 140 characters.
The short messaging service is the second largest in the whole of social media, ranking just behind Facebook. Each user can read and follow useful content, news and pictures based on just 140 characters. So what exactly is a successful Tweet? What structure should it follow to get the maximum engagement and retweets from users? This question was answered by Buffer based on data gathered from a million tweets.
Procedure and Results
To get meaningful results and to create a level playing field, Buffer scaled down their followers, retweets, mentions and favouriting of their tweets and drew the following conclusions from their observations:
- Tweets with pictures work best when they’re 20-40 characters long.
- Tweets without images are best with 120-140 characters.
- Most tweets are between 110-120 characters in length.
- Tweets with pictures generate more responses than those without.
- Tweets without links generate more responses.
- The reaction rate is higher when up to 4 hashtags are used.
What do these results actually mean?
The 6 points above need to be read with caution. Not every Twitter user’s content is based around retweeting or favouring the tweets of others. So, bloggers who want to promote their products can no longer reply on social media alone to spread the word and MUST provide a link to entice readers to go to their blog page. In addition to a link, their tweet should contain the title of their blog post or article and/or a brief but meaningful description about the post itself.
What Bloggers can learn
However, bloggers should always try to think of their potential readers. A link is as important as an image and acts as a teaser for the post or featured product. According to the results from Buffer’s work, the optimal Tweet linking to a blog post should contain an image with a link and up to 40 characters with up to 4 hashtags. Doing things this way maximises the chances of the Tweet’s success.
Social Media tools like Blog2Social, put blog posts into a suitable format for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. Once the post is published in the blog or is chosen from the WordPress backend, it can be shared via the plugin on social media. The plugin automatically adds the link and the headline to the post and generates optimized proposals for the social media posting texts according to the respective networks’ options and requirements. All the author may choose to do is edit the proposed texts and customize the postings with individual comments or relevant hashtags or handles. An automatic counter will show how much space for characters is available for the chosen social network. The author may also select a specific image for the post and schedule the day and time for all or for each individual postings to be shared on specific networks. This is all done in one single step. The tool then automatically cross-posts to all networks at their chosen time.
Social media tools like the plugin mentioned above save bloggers a lot of work, leaving more time for the important task of creating new ideas and writing more quality blog posts.
For more tips and tricks on creating successful blog posts, as well as blog marketing, targeting your audience and keyword analysis, check out Blog2Social, for lots of expert tipps and instructions.
To find out more, visit www.blog2social.com/
After the Master’s program of political communication at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf Irina Malievski is now PR volunteer for online PR, content marketing and social media at the ADENION GmbH.
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