Please Help (Social media words that work)

 I am not a big fan of Twitter but I know many people who read this blog are fans and many are progressives. One of the biggest issues facing social activists and social progressives  is the ability to get the message out and to have the message spread. One of the best ways to do this is through social media sites such as Twitter, so I thought this post by Dan Zerella at his site DanZarrella.com would be of interest to those of you who want to spread your message.

I’m a big fan of social calls-to-action. Previously, I’ve found evidence that they work on Facebook and Twitter. So I wanted to expand my research and see if I could find more words and phrases that were good at spurring people to social action.

Using a huge data set of more than 2.7 million Tweets provided to me by the awesome folks at Buffer, I analyzed the use of calls-to-action (like “please retweet”) and their relationship to retweets. To control for number of followers, I used a retweets-per-follower ratio.

I found that there are 7 words and phrases that when included in a tweet are correlated with that tweet getting more retweets than those that did not include those words. The expected CTAs are on the list: “please retweet” and “please rt” but leading up the list is the somewhat surprising “please help.”

For more social media data like this, order Dan's latest book “The Science of Marketing” now!