One simple trick to writing more popular tweets

By testing, I’ve learned that the better a tweet sounds when starting with “Reminder: ” the more popular it is likely to be.

Tweets written to seem urgent, timely or containing critical reference information do better than those that don’t.

How to use this to write better tweets

Just at the editing stage, try starting your tweets with “Reminder: ” (remove “reminder” before tweeting). The better your tweet sounds with “reminder” in front, the better it is likely to do.

Let’s take a basic tweet such as “Five tools for being more efficient on Twitter:” and try some rewrites:

1. Want to be more efficient on Twitter? Learn these five tools: (Uses Question + List)
2. Five key tools you must know to be more efficient on Twitter: (Uses List + “must know” + “key”)
3. Five top tools experts use to be more efficient on Twitter: (Uses List + “top” and “experts”)
4. New information on which tools help you be more efficient on Twitter: (Uses ”New information”)

Notice how the last one seems to work well, even though it doesn’t have the catchy phrases? (No longer a question, not a list, didn’t use either “key,” “must know,” “top” or “experts.”)

How I learned this

If something we’ve tweeted becomes popular, we sometimes tweet about it again several hours later. Sometimes we preface the repeated tweet with “#Reminder—” What I’ve learned is that almost every popular tweet we have fits well with “reminder” at the beginning.

Looking closer, I realized that this was often true not only for clicks, but also for retweets. This is interesting, because certain kinds of writing can improve clicks, but not retweets. The logic is that the tweet gets to you click, but the post itself has to be worthy before it gets a lot of retweets.

So this means that the tweet itself is possibly changing how people feel about the information, even after they read it, helping it to get retweets, not just clicks.