Viral Tweets - How to Transmit Twitter Bird Flu
July 23rd 2009 7:30 AM
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Twitter is the most effective social network for viral marketing today. It is far easier to achieve viral success than Digg, and much less time consuming than YouTube. A viral campaign also spreads way faster on Twitter than any other network. Viral tweets can generate astronomical website traffic. How do you create tweets that are too irresistible to re-tweet? It’s not as hard as you may think, as long as you keep some key points in mind.
Here are 8 very important tips to Create Viral Tweets:
1. Start With A Snappy Title
The title of your tweet is by far the most critical factor, and is 90% of the battle in creating a viral tweet. Without a title that instantly piques people’s attention, you are dead in the water. So how can you consistently create titles that draw readers in?
Learn by example, and learn from the best. Study and read through hundreds and thousands of titles on popular websites like Mashable. These websites’ posts are re-tweeted hundreds of times, and their titles are always engaging. You will find patterns in the titles that make them attractive. Keep applying these patterns on your own titles, and you will eventually succeed.
Two solid introductory articles on the subject are How to Create Effective Titles by Problogger and Optimize Blog Post Titles by Andy Beal. Although these describe how to write proper blog posts, they are equally applicable to titles on Twitter.
2. Make Re-Tweeting Easy
You’ve created a successful tweet that brings visitors to your post, they’ve read it and enjoyed it. What better way to encourage them to re-tweet your post than a button that automates the process? Answer: none!
If Twitter is a core part of your marketing strategy, you would be foolish not to integrate the TweetMeme Retweet Button into your website. This lets readers see your tweet count, and quickly re-tweet your post by clicking the button.
The button plays a significant factor in how often your posts get re-tweeted, and gives you a big advantage in achieving viral success.
3. Leverage Power Tweeters
So you’ve got a great title, and a post that is worthy of the hype it has created. What else do you need?
Power Tweeters are your followers that have tens of thousands of followers themselves. The more power tweeters in your network, the more likely and faster your tweet will spread.
A strong network of power tweeters is an important viral marketing component. What is even more important, is that they actually re-tweet your post.
I recommend creating a personal relationship with these power tweeters, and there is nothing wrong with requesting they re-tweet your message. Just make sure it adds value to their followers and is relevant to their profile.
All it took for my recent post on Twitter Spam to go viral was for Steve Farnsworth, TheRealPRMan, to re-tweet it. I have no doubt that without my tweet reaching his almost 15,000 followers, it would have never gone viral.
4. Put Lipstick On the Pig
Provide a fresh and unique perspective on a popular topic. Don’t be afraid to be controversial. If you are successful at opening or changing people’s minds on a certain topic, they will be enticed to share it with their friends.
Here’s an example. “Link Building for SEO” is a very boring title. However, “What the Simpsons Can Teach Us About Link Building” is an interesting spin on a common topic, and would have a far greater chance at going viral.
5. Solve A Problem
Find a pressing problem or a need that hasn’t been met, and tweet a link to the solution. I realized that Twitter has a big problem with spam, yet a Google search on Twitter Spam returned very few and low quality entries.
My post about how to Kill Twitter Spam met a pressing but unmet need, and became viral because it helped solve a problem on everyone’s minds.
Similarly, I believe most Twitter users would love to consistently create viral tweets. A Google search on the subject also did not return pages that adequately addressed this issue, and is the very reason I decided to blog about this topic.
6. Release Breaking News
The recently leaked Twitter documents by TechCrunch revealed that its management views it as a real-time news service. It is not surprising that tweets containing news make up the most volume on Twitter.
The opportunity to be the first to break news on Twitter does not come around often, and for most of us requires blind luck. But you don’t need to be the first to be successful.
Even tweeting an engaging or controversial response soon after news breaks on Twitter has a good chance of being re-tweeted. This strategy mirrors posting video responses on YouTube, and is equally effective.
7. Make Your Posts Scannable
That makes it critical to make your post easy and quick to read. A user should be able to understand what your post is about in under 5 seconds, or you risk losing their interest and desire to re-tweet it. How do you make your post scannable?
Organize your content into short and easy to read paragraphs. Keep your sentences relatively short. Use headers to divide out and describe the main sections of your post. And embed attractive and descriptive pictures throughout.
8. Tweet About A Celebrity
I was searching through the most tweeted messages in the marketing field this week, and one of the most popular happened to be a tweet about Guy Kawasaki. Among other things, Guy is a very successful and well known online marketer. People are interested in celebrities, and if there is tweet that provides new information on a different perspective on that celebrity, they are likely to click.
Celebrity in this sense is not confined to Hollywood. What I mean by a Twitter celebrity is anyone that is well known and respected within a certain niche.
What are your tips on how to get lots of re-tweets? What do you think of the advice provided? Please share your thoughts below.
I like the idea of taking advantage of power tweeters! It’s an idea I’d never considered before. Now the challenge is getting them to notice your tweet and RT
Jacob Stoops´s last blog ..How Search Engines Work 