Twitter is chaos. How are you to fit an entire idea is a mere 150 characters? What make a tweet successful, or popular for you or your company? How can one achieve Twitter fame?

A recent study at Cornell University uncovers that elements of a popular tweet have more to do with a tweet’s style versus the content that is being said.

What Are Some Popular Tweet Elements to Have?

In a 2014 Cornell University study, titled “The effect of wording on message propagation: Topic- and author-controlled natural experiments on Twitter,” it pinpoint key elements that will make your tweets more likely to be retweeted. Sounds simple enough.

As a recap of prior findings, there are a few key tweet elements to have:

• Find a topic that is good (It’s a given.)
• Become influential/find influential friends
• Add an image to your tweet

However, Cornell’s study recognizes that style trumps wording. By adding an extra word to the end of an identical tweet, or simply adding phrases such as: “please,” “plz,” “retweet,” “pls,” and  ultimately “please retweet” can make your tweet more popular, than one excluding one of these key phrases.

How Can We Test Our Tweets?

With an unique online tool, created by the Cornell researchers, you too, can create two tweets on the same topic and see which tweet will be retweeted more with their algorithm. Their findings can be shown in real-time, as their algorithm loads in the background.

As shown below, the online tool can take the two tweets, compare them against the other to determine the percentage of success of being shared.

• Adding an extra word, can make your tweet 50% better
• Adding “please retweet” can make your tweet around 95% more sharable

Even you can test out two tweets about cats for example, which shows that by using third-person one tweet is 52% better.

To find out more about this remarkable study, check out Mashable’s article and Washington Post for their takes on Cornell’s findings. Now, let’s put this Twitter science to work!

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Ellen Handa

Ellen will graduate May 2015 with a degree in marketing and a minor in communication studies at SMU. Born and raised in San Diego, California, she enjoys blogging, golfing and laughing at bad puns. Feel free to check out her blog: https://wellwithel.wordpress.com.
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/ellenhanda

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