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Good morning internet fans. Ryan Perry here, Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, December 2nd, therefore, it is Social Media Wednesday and, as usual, I have the very talented Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing. Good morning, Sarah.

Sarah Giametti: Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing great, thank you. It’s hard to believe that we are already in December, we are going to do I think two more shows. I forget when Christmas hits if we’re going to do two more shows or three more shows and then that’s it, we are rolling in to 2016.

SG: It’s crazy, I can’t believe how fast this year has gone.

RP: Yeah, it’s been a good year though. Today, we are going to talk about how to gain retweets. So, essentially, I put a tweet down on Twitter and part of the goal is to get people to interact with you, hence the social and social media and I guess, you know, the big… The key thing about that is, one, it lets you know that people are interested in what you are talking about. But number two, is the fact, that when people share your content, they are also extending their own credibility to you, because if my good buddy Joe retweets something I’m gong to go, “Oh, that must have value because I know Joe and I value what Joe has to say”.

SG: Right. And it helps you kind of fine tune your strategy, and in your content strategy as you’re finding content, because we talked about before Twitter, the ideal on Twitter is you post like 10, 30 times a day ’cause it moves so, fast, that you have to do content curation and as you are doing that, the retweets and the likes help you figure out on what’s working, what’s not, what is valuable so that you can start seeing what people are not finding valuable and stop looking for that type of information. So, it does really help you in fine tuning your strategy. But it does also… On the flipside, it gives you a lot of exposure, especially, if somebody whose got a big following retweets your content, it tags you, so, you get exposure to their entire following.

RP: Okay, perfect. As you know, I’m not a big fun of reinventing the wheel, so, I love today’s topic because we’re actually going to take big data information, so… And I forget, do you remember the company that did this?

SG: I do, hold on, Track Maven.

RP: Track Maven took big data information and from there, they pinpointed six different ways that when you use these strategies you are able to increase the number of retweets.

SG: Right. So, start off with the very first easy one, is that tweets on Sundays get the most retweets? And I know Ryan had said when we were offline, “But that’s the football day”. Exactly, people are sitting on their couch, surfing the internet, surfing their social media while watching football all day long. Obviously, that’s in America, it’s not everybody. But it is a high Sunday often it’s a relaxed day for people who especially if they work a Monday through Friday job. They do stuff, fun stuff Friday nights, Saturday, Saturday night with their friends, and Sunday often is kind of the relax, sit at home, veg, and do nothing day. And so, if you are a business owner and you are only tweeting Monday through Friday, you might wanna readjust your strategy to start tweeting on Sunday and see how that works out for you.

RP: Alright, that’s a good one because I am that business owner. I work Monday through Friday ideally, therefore, I tweet Monday through Friday ideally. But I think it’s important as business people that we try and understand that it’s not about us, it’s really about the consumer and what they’re looking for and what they want. And if we can’t spend a little bit of time on a Sunday, especially, with all the tools that are out there like PostPlanner and HootSuite and, I forget the one that you use, we can make this very simple and easy and then make sure that when we’re in front of people, when they’re actually viewing content. If you go to a social or business mix where nobody’s there, great, you went out and you socialized, but if nobody is there it doesn’t matter. If everybody is there on Sunday you got to show up on Sunday to some point or to some degree, I guess.

SG: Yeah, absolutely. So, try it out, change your strategy for the next few weeks and see if you are retweeting your engagement, pick up a little bit on Sundays and that’ll help you determine if you need to keep doing it and if you’re using content curation tools, it’s pretty easier to schedule out that far to do Sunday and just keep it and do it for a couple of months and see if as we enter the new year and people are out of the holidays and re-engaged and see if that helps in increasing your engagement.

RP: Right. And that’s a good point because if you are trying to use December as the benchmark for trying something new, this may not be the best time just because of everybody is moving and doing stuff for the holidays.

SG: Right.

RP: Alright. What do you got for number two?

SG: Next one is the best time for retweet. So, I always preach if you wanna tweet throughout the day when I say do 10 to 30, like you spread them out evenly through out the day. However, big data suggests that you might wanna adjust it so that a bulk of your tweets you are in the afternoon or evening. So their data is based on East Coast time and retweet start to pick up around 7:00 PM, 6:00-7:00 PM, 7:00 PM and they peak at 10:00 to 11:00 and they’re still really high all the way up until 1:00 AM and then they drop off. And that’s East Coast time, so, Ryan and I are in California 1:00 AM there is 10:00 AM here so it’s not all that late. So you may wanna adjust, obviously, retweets happen all along but maybe not do the middle of the night time and push it towards late morning and all the way until late evening and see if adjusting your timing strategy ups your retweets and engagement.

RP: Right. And the other thing that I know that I do is, that the reality is if you’re gonna push out… I like to get around 15 pieces of content out on Twitter everyday, and I do my best… Because I curate all my content, I do my best to provide quality content. Sometimes it’s slim pickings. So, as you’re pushing content out the other thing I would recommend is going “Alright, if I know when the key times are that people are going to retweet, that’s when I wanna put my best quality content out, because it’s gonna have a better chance of creating more visibility for me.”

SG: Right. And you can also… If the content is slim pickings, reuse your own stuff. Twitter moves so… It’s not like Facebook, where you put your blog article out three days apart from each other people are gonna see them that close together. That Twitter moves so fast, that if you use your own content and you should hopefully have a fair amount of content to pull from even if you got 10 blogs, you can sprinkle that in three a day. And then if you repeat it three days later you’re not gonna offend anybody because high probability is a bunch of your followers didn’t see it the first time.

RP: Right, definitely.

SG: So, next up is hashtags. Hopefully, you are using hashtags in your Twitter strategy. And since you’re limited to 140 characters, this one’s really interesting to me, because I haven’t quite figured out how this happens. They says tweets with five hashtags are retweeted a lot more than tweets with no hashtags. And the graph actually shows… The graph I’m looking at, actually shows 11-plus, like has a huge number of retweets. I’m like, “How do people have 11 hashtags? That’s a whole dang tweet.”

RP: Yeah, that is… I don’t know. So, here’s the problem with big data is that we’re collectively bringing in a lot of stuff and if there’s a certain demographic that may be a spiking the numbers a little bit, and your business model doesn’t fit those demographics, you may not want to incorporate five hashtags. Now, with that being said, test the theory and see what happens. It’s, ultimately, that’s really what’s important because a lot of these people that are thought leaders in the industry, they’re doing unique stuff like posting with five hashtags to see what the end results are, and then they’re tweaking their message and their content accordingly.

SG: Right. So, five might be a little difficult, but, definitely, use hashtags and incorporate it into the message that you’re writing. So, whereas, Instagram works a little different, you do both. You integrate the hashtags within the content plus add a few extras. In Twitter, you really want to have it incorporated as part of the message. So, this one we would probably hashtag Twitter or social media marketing would be a hashtag. So, you do it as part of the sentence so it makes sense, easy readability, and that’s an easy way to get a couple additional hashtags into your short amount of 140 characters.

RP: Yeah, definitely. And it totally reminds me of the skit… I forget if it was SNL or I can’t think of his name, but they did the whole “Hashtag, hashtag,” and it was…

SG: Oh, Justin Timberlake.

RP: Yes, with Timberlake and whose The Late Night host, though? I can totally see… Is it Fallon?

SG: What? No… Oh, yeah. It might have been Jimmy Fallon.

RP: Yeah, so anyhow the whole “Hashtag, hashtag.” So, anyhow, these are all tips. They’re from a black and white numbers point of view, they’re legit. In your industry, they may or may not work but maybe instead of five you find that three works effectively. So try something. We’ve got five minutes. I think we have two more tips to go, is that correct?

SG: Three, I think.

RP: Oh, three more. Okay.

SG: I can do them fast. So, the next one is use images. Tweets with photos are most likely to get retweeted. So, if you’re only doing texts and links start incorporating some photos. And I know… Like with Post Planner, it’s easy to lookup photos that you can use as your content creation. There are quotes or interesting information, facts, things like that. So, start incorporating photos into it because they do tend to get more retweets than other type of content.

RP: Right. And the other thing that I really like about Post Planner is that if the blog article that I’m linking to has an image, it’ll automatically bring that image in also and then I can… Sometimes I don’t like the images they use, so I can replace that image or I can just delete it or send it out as a text, ’cause I’m a big fan visually, so, I try and incorporate video and images into a lot of my tweets, but I find I go too far on that, so, I have strip some out every now and then just to mix it up.

SG: Yeah, so, you definitely want balance to some extent. I mean, you don’t want a perfect order. Text, link, picture, video. Text, link, picture, video, ’cause then that gets boring, but at least make sure you’re mix in at all four different types. If you do two pictures in a row nobody cares it’s fine. Just don’t do everything pictures and neglect the other types of posts. If you’re not doing any pictures, make sure, of course, are incorporating some. The next one, number five, is if you’re going to ask people to retweet your content, which I don’t typically use this strategy often. I think it’s a little…

RP: Self-serving maybe?

SG: Yeah, a little self-serving where you’d rather have valuable content and people do it on their own without asking for it. But if there is something that you wanna ask people, maybe you’re doing some charity event or a contest, common abbreviation for retweet is RT, but the big data shows if you spell out the word retweet you get way more engagements spelling out the word than using the abbreviation, RT.

RP: Okay. I think we can just blow past that one because it’s very self-serving.

SG: Yeah, yep. The next one is number six, use exclamation points to get more retweets, and this one’s interesting because…

RP: Now hold it, this has got really interesting information behind it, I already have a total strategy laid out just based on number six here.

SG: So, they’re saying the more exclamations the better. And this graph is funny because with Zero you still get retweets without them, you add one and it almost doubles. And then, you add a second one, and, again, it goes up 50%. Two and three are the same, so, use two or three, it doesn’t matter. And then, going up to four it goes up a little bit. Four and five are the same, six and seven are about the same. And then, it jumps for eight, and then it jumps again for nine. It’s incredible the difference. But again, nine exclamation points may not be your style. It’s not mine necessarily, I’m not gonna type nine exclamation points. To me, it looks very unprofessional and young. So definitely cut it, you can take this one a little bit with a grain of salt. But just adding one or two, if you’re excited about something, you’ve got an event going on, maybe something a charity, a contest, a big sale. Think about incorporating it and maybe not using Ryan’s strategy that he has here.

RP: Well, hold it, you haven’t heard my strategy… Well, you’ve heard my strategy but everybody else hasn’t. So, just based on big data, my goal is to just send out a tweet that just says retweet. And I didn’t think about the whole hashtag thing, so, I guess I have to say retweet, retweet, or #retweet, #retweet. I got to do that five times with nine exclamations on the back end, and that will give me maximum retweet value. I’ll be crushin’ it.

SG: Totally, that’s a great strategy, you should try that.

RP: Totally crushin’ it.

SG: And for the rest of you, don’t try that because it’s boring and nobody’s gonna retweet it. So those were some tips, they may… Again, this is big data and so big companies are influencing some of this. But definitely take a look at it and see which ones you think you can incorporate in your strategy to modify it a little bit the next couple months, and see if it improves your engagement in your retweets and ups your Twitter exposure for you.

RP: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s the key take away is, “Look, here’s six different ideas. Use them appropriate for your brand and, even if it feels uncomfortable, try it.” If you do a two week test of using nine exclamation marks, as an example, yes, it might feel uncomfortable because you’ve never done it before. But that doesn’t mean your audience is going to rise up and just start abandoning your Twitter account, you may actually get more engagement. But if you don’t step out of your comfort zone you may never know. So, I know a big one for me is Sunday, I don’t post on Sunday, I need to start posting on Sunday. So, that’s definitely something I’m gonna be using right away.

SG: Perfect. And look at the schedule too, the time of day that you’re posting, especially, if you’re not doing too many and you’re not hitting every hour of the day. Then maybe adjust your schedule to be later in the day, not so much in the morning.

RP: Alright, perfect. Well, I think we gave some really good content today. I’d be curious to see people’s response, would love to hear what type of different ways you tested this and what the end results were. We are out of time today. Sarah, as always, I appreciate your time and energy, and we’ll see you, Sarah, and everybody else next week.

SG: Great. Thanks, Ryan, have a great day.

RP: Alright, will do. Till next week. Everybody have a good one.