Visual Contenting April 2016 | Page 22

SOCIAL MEDIA • Tweets with image links get twice the engagement – retweets, replies, and likes – than tweets without. Twitter may have a character limit, but graphics really do work wonders on the feed. • Tweets with images alone receive 18% more clicks, 89% more likes, and 150% more retweets than plain text tweets. • Retweets happen most between the hours of 10 and 11 pm Eastern time. • Don’t worry if your tweets seem to be ignored; only 23% of tweets ever get a reply. • Including at least one hashtag will tend to double your engagement rates, though of course this will be subject to the specific hashtag and topic. • Tweets between 120 and 130 characters – out of the Twitter maximum of 140 – get the most clicks. Don’t forget that this includes hashtags! • Twitter is the most-used social network for black people, so much so that “black Twitter” even has its own Wikipedia page. Seriously, check it out. If your primary demographic is largely black, Twitter becomes a correspondingly better platform for your marketing. Visual Contenting • The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the older age brackets, specifically 55-64 year olds. This will continue for as long as the Twitter userbase grows and Twitter continues to exist. As long as time continues to flow, that is. • When sharing an article, tweets with the headline receive around 15% more clicks than tweets with an excerpt of the copy. Makes sense, right? Your headline is optimized to draw interest, where a random line of copy is not. All of this is just scratching the surface, and a lot of it is aggregate data. What that means is that, when I say you’ll have 12x more retweets when you ask for an RT, you’re not literally going to go from 1 to 12 RTs every time. It all depends on your audience; these are just statistics and trends pulled from an analysis of millions of tweets. Who knows! Some of the data might not even be accurate. You study 200 million tweets, and that’s cool, but over 500 million tweets are made every single day. It’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to what actually goes on. Applying Pareto One of the best marketing tips you can implement to kick your Twitter marketing up a notch is to apply the Pareto Principle to your content. The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80-20 rule, and states that 80 percent of your results tend to come from 20 percent of your work. How does this apply to Twitter? What most people do is consider their feed in groups of 10 tweets. Out of every 10 messages you post, 8 of them – 80 percent – should be general interest and general value. We’re talking about links to content you didn’t create, memes, image