As marketers there is nothing better than when a twitter post gets retweeted by a lot of followers. This is a great way to gain new followers, and get lots of high quality traffic to your website or blog. A new study from Twitter indicates that of all the things you can post, nothing will attract retweets better than photos and videos.
In the study they looked at how many different factors affected engagement from followers. They analyzed what they called “hard features” including photos, hashtags, links, videos and tweets containing a number (sports scores or other stats). Looking at over 2 million tweets from thousands of different accounts, they were able to identify exactly what types of things get looked at the most, and retweeted.
The following are the percentage increases in retweets when each of the following items were included in the original tweet:
- Hashtag – 16% Increase
- Digit – 17% Increase
- Quote – 19% Increase
- Video URL – 28% Increase
- Photo URL – 35% Increase
While twitter acknowledges that each industry or niche will have unique results, these numbers should be a good baseline for marketers to follow. Of course, if you’re constantly putting out uninteresting videos or photos, your followers will eventually catch on and either stop following you all together, or stop looking at your photos. Naturally, they won’t retweet anything that isn’t interesting either.
On the surface, however, the study confirms that high quality photos and videos are an easy way to get your brand exposed to many new people. Whether you’re using funny videos, or images of a product, or anything else, make sure you’re including them in your tweets whenever possible.
Something else many marketers may want to experiment with is combining things from this list of hard features on twitter. For example, tweeting a famous quote, with a hashtag, and including a related photo URL may provide further benefits. Experiment and share your results in the comments below.
You can see the full study from Twitter HERE.
