Writing clearly is a strong marketing weapon. Clarity of language is what gets your emails opened, landing page forms completed, and products understood. And guess what? Clarity of language is also what gets your tweets shared.
In his Science of Social Media research, Dan Zarrella deconstructed different parts of our speech to determine the ones that resonate most with people. Dan discovered that verbs are the part of speech that generate the most shares. Verbs beat all -- adverbs, adjectives and nouns -- in terms of attracting the highest number of shares. In fact, Twitter updates that include verbs have a 2% higher shareability than the average tweet.
Part of the explanation behind this phenomenon is that shareability levels on Twitter are not particularly high. In other words, people don’t like to think too much about the information you’ve shared with them. They want to be able to inhale it instantly, which in turn prompts them to spread it across their networks.
This is great news for you as a marketer and business owner, because it proves your tweets should always include calls-to-action. Twitter is known as the link economy, so you should strive to refer people to your landing pages and invite them to take action once they are there.
Marketing Takeaway
The marketing lesson from this piece of data is that you need to make your tweets more actionable. Use verbs and to make them more action-oriented and compelling. Think about ways in which you can tweak your updates to give them more vibrant language. Most importantly, transform them into calls-to-action by including words such as “download,” “grab,” “receive,” “claim,” and “register.” Be clear in what you want your Twitter followers to do, and leverage this power to generate more leads from Twitter.
Stacy Taylor 5:04 PM on October 06, 2011
I love this type of analysis by Dan Zarrella, but a 2% difference doesn't seem greatly significant.
Si 6:44 PM on October 06, 2011
Is it only me who sees the irony in the word Adverb being mis-spelled in the posted graph?
Sorry, couldn't resist. Hardly surprising though - American English is sadly short on adverbs, with adjectives crowding them out. Yes, I'm feeling real good today!
Aida Rojas 11:02 PM on October 06, 2011
That is a good tip, I will try to include more verbs on my tweets, just wondering if it would be the same for facebook . . .
Steven Pofcher 12:07 PM on October 10, 2011
While these numbers are interesting, wouldn't most Tweets include most of the above parts of speech anyway. An example would help.
Also, is 2% really statictically relevant?
The research seems to be research for research sake?
Mandy Kilinskis 9:52 AM on October 11, 2011
I know a lot of people are commenting about the 2% and if it matters. I say that it absolutely does. If you're working with, say, 100 followers, that's two more people that will retweet. And those two people will send it to their lists of 100ish followers. That's 200 (give or take) people that wouldn't have seen your tweet, brand, or product before. I know that I've found new brands because my followers have retweeted tweets with action verbs in them.
I'd love to see if humor or interesting titles outrank the actual parts of speech in terms of retweets.