Study reveals the secrets of a good Tweet

Post by Tom Blackburn on 2nd February 2012
 in Social media, Twitter

A study of thousands of tweets has pinned down what people love – and hate – about Twitter content.

The study was carried out by academics at three top American universities.

And it concluded that the tweets which got the biggest response were either informative or funny, or both.

To gather their data, the  research team set up a website, to which they gave the snappy title 'Who Gives A Tweet?', which invited people to volunteer to have their Twitter messages evaluated by strangers, and in return these people then rated tweets posted by their friends.

The invitation received 43,000 responses, and the team of researchers then analysed the responses which were given to the tweets, aiming to find tips which could help people become better Tweeters.

The more general tips which the researchers came up with as a result of their work were:

Do: be useful, be novel, be compelling, be short, and contribute something meaningful to the story.

Don't: be boring, whine, overuse hashtags or abbreviations, or re-hash old news.

But, surprisingly, there was a reasonably relaxed response to many self-promotional tweets: "The Twitter eco-system values learning about new content", the report noted.

Commenting on the findings, Megan Garber of news website Theatlantic.com said: "Though Twitter won't necessarily replace traditional news, it increasingly functions as a real-time newswire, disseminating and amplifying information gathered from the world and the web.

"At the same time, though, being social, it functions as a source of entertainment - which means that we have increasingly high, and increasingly normalised, expectations for Twitter as both a place and a platform. We want it to enlighten us, but we also want it to amuse us."