Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Best Way to Make the Bird Sing...

Twitter is like the news of social media. With a limit of 140 characters you get nice, bite-sized chunks of information that updates about every minute or so and it leaves you coming back for more. However, we don’t end up reading every tweet: some we favorite and others we just skim past. There is some psychology behind why we do this. Buffersocial posted an article called “What 1 Million Tweets Taught Us About How People Tweet Successfully” in which they found the following:

  • -      For tweets with images, shorter tweets of 20-40 characters did best
  • -      For tweets without images, longer tweets of 120 to 140 characters did best
  • -      The most popular tweet length was 110-120 characters
  • -      Tweets with images received more engagement than tweets without images
  • -      Tweets without links go more retweets, favorites, and replies than tweets with links
  • -      Engagement for tweets with hashtags seems to rise steadily all the way to 4 hashtags per tweet.

I decided to test this out.  I consciously browsed through my twitter feed and made note of which tweets of verified accounts I liked or retweeted and which tweets I just scrolled past.

The Tweets I Liked or Retweeted





-       I liked this tweet because it was short and concise. This tweet is also something that most people can relate too and so because of this, it earns a “like”.





-       Lilly Singh is a famous youtuber who was recently on the Jimmy Fallon show and because of this, she was trending on Facebook and she posted a picture of it in this tweet. I liked this tweet because it’s something that doesn’t happen to everyone and fans, like me, can’t help but press “like” to show that they support her and are proud of her. Also, the tweet is concise and expresses that she’s grateful without being too long.




Cassey Ho is a famous youtuber who makes videos about fitness, exercising and eating clean. Although I can’t personally relate to “having fitbits” or eating “quest bars”, I still found the picture of Ariel singing the Disney song with fitness-related lyrics amusing and so it earned a like from me. The tweet is close to 24-40 characters in length and adds humor to the picture making it more likely to earn likes or retweets.
The Tweets That I Ignored...


-       This is a tweet that I skimmed past because the tweet length was too long. Also the picture contained a lot of words that I didn’t want to stop and read which lead to me ignoring it. This tweet could’ve been better if the tweet was a little bit more concise and if the picture didn’t contain so many words. The picture could’ve also incorporated an image with all the words so it looked more appealing to the eye.



-       Vogue’s actual tweet is short and sweet and is about 20 characters or less. The reason I ignored the tweet however was because it contained a link. According to the research mentioned above, tweets without links usually get more retweets. This makes sense because when a tweet contains a link, you have to click it to better understand what the tweet is about and that takes more time and effort. Instead of having a link, this tweet could’ve have been better if there was an appealing picture to catch the eye of the audience and this could perhaps urge the person to click the link.




 This is a tweet from Amitabh Bachchan who is probably the most famous actor in India. However, his tweet failed to capture my attention and I ended up ignoring it. This is because tweet is very long and the way it is written is not very clear. He could have made this tweet better by shortening the character length and writing it in a way that is more understandable.


For the most part, the tweets I liked/retweeted and the tweets that I ignored did correlate with the research above. I found that I was more likely to like/retweet the short, concise tweets that got straight to the point or had an eye-catching, pleasing image that captured my attention. The tweets that were significantly longer in character length or had a link with no picture were tweets that I ended up ignoring.

Now the next time you and I make a tweet we’ll know how to make it better.



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