5 Steps to Viral on Twitter

Dan Zarella is the author of The Social Media Marketing Book and a self-proclaimed "social media scientist." He's done massive amounts of research on viral marketing, and in 2009, did a major study on Twitter. His particular focus was on going viral--how do tweeters get "retweets" (repostings of their messages)? What are the secrets to a retweet-able message?

To solve that question would be to strike a marketing goldmine. Lucky for Zarella, the Twitter case had some pretty interesting results with some pretty major viral marketing implications. Although this data was taken from Twitter and the recommendations are for Twitter specifically, some principles would probably transfer to other social media. Use your best marketing judgment.

So, without further ado, here are Zarella's five steps to going viral on twitter (taken from Zarella's CopyBlogger.com article):

1) Just ask. Ask your followers to retweet! This bumps retweeting up from a measly .5% up to 5.5%. Don't forget to say please!

2) Time it right. Zarella's research shows that more retweeting occurs Monday through Wednesday than the rest of the week. In addition, peak retweeting hours seem to be 9am and 6pm. And why, yes, that is when most people are supposed to be working.

3) Link it. Nearly 70% of retweets contain embedded links. Our friend the social media scientist is pretty excited about how this fact contributes to the "viral recipe." Personally, I'm not convinced that this is really so special. Anything worth retweeting is likely worth more than 160 characters. So, after factoring in linkless retweets like inspirational quotes and TextsFromLastNight, 70% is probably about the number of retweets we'd expect to recommend further content.

4) Get lots of retweets. Think of it in the "you have to have money to make money" sense. Every time that a tweet is reposted, its odds of being retweeted further go up exponentially. This is particularly true if someone with a large following retweets the content. So, the moral of the story is... beg your friends to retweet your content. And see if someone awesome like Conan O'Brien will retweet for you too.

5) Add value. Zarella admits that "value" is a nebulous term, though he doesn't do much himself to flesh out the idea. However, it seems that the point is that, in your 160 characters of glory, you have to convince the twitterpated that your retweet has some kind of value for them (and for their followers). Zarella notes that instructional content, warnings, freebies, contests, and breaking news seem to do the best in this category.

There you have it.

Now, run along and start the next phishing scare!