4 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter By NBO

Twitter didn’t even exist about three years back, but now it has become one of the most used social networking tools ever. Twitter is a force that any serious web publisher needs to reckon with in order to gain maximum exposure for content. Twitter is changing the way information spreads online. Links that would have been blogged a couple of years ago are now more often shared via the micro-blogging service instead, which fundamentally changes strategy when trying to spreed some content among a large amount of people.

Publishers can complain and wistfully wish for the good old days of blog links and Google juice, or they can adapt to the new reality Twitter represents. Getting your content “ReTweeted” on Twitter (i.e. getting people to repeat what you’ve said, usually along with a link) can drive significant quality traffic to your site, which in turn can boost your subscriber numbers.

So, how does ReTweeting happen, anyway? Well, here are the 5 factors you need to take into account when trying to get your content to spread virally on Twitter.

1. Call to Action

ReTweeting is an action you wish your readers to take, and, like any other action, the best way to persuade people to do it is to ask them to. And when a user ReTweets your content, they’re very likely to also repost your call to action, lending it their credibility and influence.

The research has shown that the word “please” occurs n ReTweets far more often than it occurs in other Tweets. A quick look at the text of the most ReTweeted Tweets in my ReTweet mapper shows that the explicit “please ReTweet” is the most common call to action and occurs in a large number of ReTweeted messages. In the interest of brevity it typically comes in the form of “please RT;” again, when your message is ReTweeted by a new user, they are in effect asking their followers to ReTweet it for them.
Other common calls to action that frequently occur in the most ReTweeted Tweets include variations of the following:
•    Check out…
•    Follow this person
•    Please vote
•    Help me
•    Questions, e.g. “What do you think of…”

2. Timing

The Research into ReTweeting as well as other forms of viral content sharing indicates that there is a window of time during which sharing occurs more often. The first few days of the business week, Monday through Wednesday, typically see more ReTweeting than Thursday, Friday and the weekend.
Time of day also seems to be important; between 9am and 6pm EST the amount of ReTweets is more compared to the other times. So if you want your content to be ReTweeted it is advisable to post it in that duration.

3. Links

The data also showed that almost 70% of all ReTweets contain a link. This is good news for marketers that the phenomenon of  of ReTweeting is an acceptable way to spread your off-Twitter content, and it tells us that a link is an important ingredient to ReTweetable Tweets.

4. Value

Every “social media expert” tells you that you have to “add value” to the social media. In the context of ReTweets, value comes in a variety of formats, and by looking at the most ReTweeted tweets. The company NBO- National Business Online (www.nbo.co.nz) has been able to deduce a few common, concrete examples:
•    How Tos and Instructional Content
•    News, especially breaking news
•    Warnings (like the DM phishing scam)
•    Freebies and Contests

What are you doing?  Have you found any other factors and tactics that seem to get your message ReTweeted?

Thus to summerize, we can say that the Retweeting a twitter post leads to the broadcasting of a lot of vital information which spreads from one person to another and thus the twitter post from the original source goes viral over the network.  It could also be said that the word please plays an important role in sprearding the news.

NBO - National Business Online ( www.nbo.co.nz) has also mentioned about the importance of web-identity and how twitter is one of the social network means to to develop the identity in the post “Building a Web Identity : essential for any growing business says NBO“  in the blog somtomm.com.