Credit: Telegraph.co.uk

Credit: Telegraph.co.uk

Still looking for ways to increase shares and re-tweets?

As small owners, we all want to be able to craft original and engaging blog posts and posts that will not only please our followers and blog visitors, but also stand a good chance of being picked up and shared more often.

We want to build a strong relationship with our readership, but it also helps raise awareness of our brand with others when we post something that is easily shareable.

research is very revealing

Last year, Twitter took an in-depth look at millions of tweets across different sectors including government, news, sports, music and TV to see what common elements were shared amongst those posts that were re-tweeted more often. Their results were quite eye-opening, and gives us a great insight into how we should formulate our posts for more shareability, not just on Twitter, but within our blog posts and posts too.

The hard features used in Twitter are: Photographs, hashtags, links, stats and videos. The use of hashtags is probably the most commonly associated feature used with Twitter specifically, but it’s use has also spread across other social media platforms too.

Twitter also noticed that posts containing numbers or digits were also shared more often. So polling results, campaign results, sports scores etc. all ranked very well initially, but were more likely to be shared by followers than posts without statistics or data results.

What became more obvious as the research was going on was that people don’t engage in the same way with every tweet, but those posts with added links, video clips, stats or photographs resulted in higher than average re-tweet rates.

Twitter results across verified accounts

Here is the summary of the study, and you can see that applying any of these elements to your posts will increase it’s chance of initial engagement, and also increase your sharing likelihood.

Photos average a 35% boost in Re-tweets
Videos get a 28% boost
Quotes get a 19% boost in Re tweets
Including a number receives a 17% bump in Re tweets
Hashtags receive a 16% boost

You have to bear in mind that the study was conducted over a wide range of industries, so results will be a little different when broken down by industry. So for example, a post with a photograph may garner more re-tweets from a TV or sports based account rather than a government based account.

Tweaking your posts with added elements

Obviously, when you sit down to write a new blog post, you will want to add in an element that could enhance your message, but don’t go mad and dump in everything listed above and expect it to work! There is such a thing as trying too hard, you know?

Not every element mentioned above will work for you, especially if it’s something that doesn’t sit well with your particular industry, or would make your followers or customers feel uncomfortable. For example, if your business sold precision surgical instruments, you wouldn’t want to post a video of open heart surgery to your Facebook page to demonstrate the quality of your scalpels!

The same thing applies if you sell, ahem, embarrassing products….. trust me, no one will want to see anything like that demonstrated in full HD.

Incorporating relevant stats and the latest results for your industry will help to inform your readers, and they will be more likely to share your post with their like-minded friends. So for example, if you offer hypnotherapy sessions to help people stop smoking, to lose weight, or to get over a particular phobia, then quoting the success rates for people using hypnotherapy will not only be encouraging for your readers, but will be useful for their friends who may also have similar issues to address.

Update, recycle and re-use interesting data

Take a look at your social media metrics. Can you identify your most engaging posts, then see if you included anything extra that was of particular interest to your readers. You may already be sitting on a lot of clues to improving your own post shareability.

Maybe you had a really popular post a few weeks ago that contained some stats, figures or a link to something quite topical. Could it be time for a follow-up post to update your readers? It could be that there are newly updated figures or results that you can report back on.

There is also no shame in recycling your previous work, so have a look to see if there is any way of re-using your the elements of your most popular posts to write another one on the same topic, but maybe from a different angle or viewpoint.

Don’t forget that you have the wealth of experience from the Lobster Digital team at your fingertips. If you need some assistance with your social media marketing, then do not hesitate to contact us for some advice.