Small Business: The Art of Retweeting

Getting retweeted on Twitter is no small feat.

In fact, a study released last year by Sysomos, a provider of social media monitoring and analytics tools, found that out of the 1.2 billion tweets they examined, only 6 percent were retweeted.

While the numbers are disappointing, it's not impossible to get your corporate message retweeted. It just means you have to work a lot harder to produce compelling content that your users will want to broadcast, say experts.

"There's a tremendous amount of noise out there," says Andrew Hazen, founder of Prime Visibility, a Melville-based digital marketing firm. "To get retweeted, you need to provide information that people deem worthy of sharing with their network."

That said, here are some top ways to get retweeted:

Grow Your Followers: If you have limited followers, there are only so many retweets you can get, says Hazen. Follow other people, and hopefully they will follow you back. Also try engaging influential people, says Hazen. "Begin to listen to their conversations, and when you find the right moment to reply or retweet with meaning, then do so," says Hazen. If they reply back, that broadcasts you to their followers. Also, on Fridays on Twitter you can recommend people to follow by tweeting #followfriday and their handle. Oftentimes they give you a shout back, and that helps publicize you to their audience, notes Hazen.

Beat the Pack: If you see breaking news, even if it's of local interest to your region, try to be one of the first to tweet it, suggests Hazen.

Add RT: Adding "Please Retweet" or "Please RT" to your tweets tells your audience you'd like your post retweeted, says Hazen.

Produce compelling tweets: Self-serving tweets rarely get retweeted. Follow the 80/20 rule, suggests Sarah Milstein, a Brooklyn-based Web strategist and co-author of "The Twitter Book" (O'Reilly; $19.99). That means 80 percent of your tweets would not be about your company and the other 20 percent would, she notes. "Instead of thinking about Twitter as a broadcast channel," she says. "Think about it as a place to have conversations with people interested in the same things you are."

Less is best: You only have 140 characters per tweet, so you want to accommodate for people being able to add the customary RT space and your Twitter handle before their retweet. This signifies who they are retweeting. Milstein tries to make her posts no more than 130 characters so her followers have room to include RT @SarahM.

Retweet others: The people who get the most retweets are those who also retweet, says Kyle Lacy, a digital marketing consultant in Indianapolis and author of "Twitter Marketing for Dummies" (Wiley; $24.99).

Make it easy: Add a retweet button to your website or blog to encourage people to retweet your content, Lacy suggests. Sites like Sharethis.com enable you to place a widget on your website for visitors to retweet your website content, says Lacy.

Make it fun: Tips and lists often get retweeted, says Lacy. But so do contests and promos, says Karl Groeger, president of Looney Tunes, a family owned record store in West Babylon. The company got on Twitter about six months ago and says getting retweeted "is extremely challenging." They've found the most success with time-sensitive give-a-ways or contests. For example, they held a contest on Twitter where they were giving away a pair of Foo Fighters concert tickets to the first person to come into the store dressed as TV pitchman Billy Mays. "It got retweeted 500 times," says Groeger, noting that getting retweeted can be hit or miss. But one thing he knows for sure: To get retweeted, "it has to be special."

Fast Fact

The majority of tweets -- 92.4 percent -- happen within the first hour of the original tweet being published. After that, your chances greatly diminish (1.63 percent in the second hour).

Source: Sysomos