Tips to Get More Twitter Retweets

Twitter can be a great tool to boost traffic to your blog, but you can only get so much exposure from publishing tweets in your own Twitter stream.  To truly gain word-of-mouth buzz that drives more visitors to your blog, you need to write tweets that are interesting enough that people want to retweet them to their own followers thereby increasing your online exposure exponentially.  Following are five tips to help you write Twitter updates that get retweeted effectively.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="650"] How to Write Twitter Updates that Get Retweeted[/caption]

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1. Give Your Link the Importance It Deserves

Twitter updates can only be 140 characters in length.  When someone retweets one of your Twitter updates, the retweet typically appends the RT abbreviation (which stands for retweet) and your username (such as @adeemjan) to the beginning of the retweet.  This is also what most automated retweet tools do.  If your original link was at the end of your  Twitter update and another person's retweet of your original update adds more characters to the update, it's very likely that the original link could be truncated or deleted completely to ensure the retweet stays within the 140-character Twitter limit.  With that in mind, use a URL shortener and put your links near the beginning of your tweets, so they're not lost in retweets.

2. Be Shareworthy

Your Twitter updates have to add value to the online conversation, meaning they need to be interesting, informational, educational, or just plain entertaining.  In other words, your Twitter updates have to be what I refer to as "shareworthy" or no one will retweet them.

3. Know Your Audience

You need to understand who your followers are and who your target audience is and then provide the kinds of content they're interested in and likely to want to share with their own followers.  If you're not tweeting the updates that your audience wants, they won't share your updates and might even end up ignoring your future tweets or unfollowing you.

4. Be Persistent

Twitter works like conversations do -- if you're too quiet, you'll be forgotten and people will look for someone else to talk to.  Make sure you stay active on Twitter, share others' content, send direct messages, use @replies, and so on to stay on other users' radar screens (i.e., Twitter streams).

5. Be Consistent

Over time, your Twitter followers will create expectations for you based on the type of tweets you've published in the past.  While it's certainly acceptable to tweet unusual updates, it's more important that you consistently build your brand.  As people develop expectations for a brand, they become loyal to it, and loyalty leads to brand advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing (through retweets).  Just as a business builds its brand to boost profits, you need to build your own online brand reputation to boost your retweets.