How to be popular on Twitter?

These days it's hard to find a person who doesn't know what Twitter is. A microblogging service less than six years old has more than 500 million registered users and it becomes wider every day. The reason for such popularity is a sort of satisfaction you get while sharing your tweets when you get retweeted by your followers, which means people care about things you write) This particular thing makes people become addictive to Twitter, causing them to generate hundreds of tweets a day. But of course not everything you write get retweets. So what do you write in your messages to catch other peoples attention?

Naveed Nasir and his colleagues at the University of Koblenz -Landau in Germany, spent the whole study. They studied a combined dataset of over 60 million tweets and around 4.5 million users, looking for the common conventions for retweets and identified five rules to increase your chances of a retweet:

1) Watch your punctuation

Tweets with exclamation marks were unlikely to be retweeted. The opposite was true of question marks. This could be because tweets that pose questions are passed on to provide

or find an answer.

2) Nice words trump nasty

Tweets containing strong positive words like "great" or "excellent" and negative terms such as "suck" or fail" were likely to be retweeted. But positive terms were slightly more

so. The researchers suggest that this might be because people could be a bit more reluctant to retweet rude or harsh terms.

3) Use emoticons wisely

Including a positive emoticon, such as :-), is a sure way to lower your probability of a retweet. A negative one, such as :-( increases the chances.

4) Be relevant

Topics that address broader public interest are more likely to be retweeted than, for example, messages about how users felt that day, or messages directed specifically at another

person (@replies). The most popular retweeted topics concern social networking, public holidays and the economy.

5) Bad news is good

It appears that tweets which are annoying or not pleasant tend to get retweeted often. Likewise for tweets that express exciting or intense sentiments. In other words, bad news

travels fast on Twitter.

Source