Content on Twitter -does- matter

[Jessi]

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/study_suggests_content_matters_on_twitter.php

 

Yeah yeah, we all know that content matters. When it comes to Twitter, though, there's the temptation that because it's short snippets less than 140 characters, the content quality doesn't have to be quite as high.

 

That study is showing that it might matter after all anyway. Here's some of the more interesting findings:

 

Among the key findings predicting the likelihood of an article getting tweeted and retweeted:

• Source was the biggest indicator. The more reliable the source, the better chances of a tweet.
  
• Stories in popular categories will spread more rapidly. (As Megan Garber at The Atlantic notes, "Health! technology! cats!").
  
• Mention a known person, place or organization and you're also more likely to get your story tweeted (which explains why celebrities' names often litter the trending topics column whenever I log into Twitter).
  

What does not, however, seem to influence an articles tweetability is emotion. Emotional articles were no more likely to be spread than objective articles, the researchers said. "Brand matters; information matters; tone, however, doesn't seem to make much of a difference when it comes to sharing," Garber wrote in her thorough analysis of the study.

[Nathan]

Ah nice find. So that does make sense now as I've seen some sites pop up where people go to get the best tweets or best way to say something in 140 characters.

[bryce12]

Great article, it's bang on target. Content does matter whether we are sending a tweet or updating a blog. For twitter, we need to be ever more creative since we got only 140 characters to express ourselves. So in order to get your tweet noticed, you need to post high quality content that stands out amont millions of tweets.