The 20 Least ReTweetable Words

Aug 25th 2009 View Comments




I’ve looked at the 20 words and phrases that tend to get the most ReTweets, but what about the flip-side of that coin? What about the words that are least likely to get your ReTweets?

I used my database of over 30 million ReTweets, and compared it to a sample of over 2 million random Tweets and found the common words that occurred far more often in non-ReTweets. The percentages below represent the relative Un-ReTweetability of the 20 least ReTweetable words.

Some Highlights from the List

There are a number of “-ing” verbs, including “going,” “watching” and “listening,”  which reinforces my understanding that answers to the “What are you doing?” question don’t get very many ReTweets.

The presence of “sleep,” “bed,” “night,” and “tired” indicate that people often Tweet “goodnight” style messages, but generally don’t ReTweet them.

The relatively informal nature of many of the words on the list including “lol,” “gonna,” and “hey,” show that simple or slang conversation is not ReTweetable.

The lesson learned here is that if you’re trying to get more ReTweets, don’t just engage in idle chit-chat or Tweet about mundane activities.

Occurrences Word or Phrase
0.88% game
0.84% going
0.72% haha
0.71% lol
0.7% but
0.66% watching
0.63% work
0.6% home
0.48% night
0.44% bed
0.43% well
0.38% sleep
0.38% gonna
0.37% hey
0.32% tomorrow
0.3% tired
0.29% some
0.29% back
0.29% bored
0.28% listening

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