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I’m a big fan of social calls-to-action. Previously, I’ve found evidence that they work on Facebook and Twitter. So I wanted to expand my research and see if I could find more words and phrases that were good at spurring people to social action.
Using a huge data set of more than 2.7 million Tweets provided to me by the awesome folks at Buffer, I analyzed the use of calls-to-action (like “please retweet”) and their relationship to retweets. To control for number of followers, I used a retweets-per-follower ratio.
I found that there are 7 words and phrases that when included in a tweet are correlated with that tweet getting more retweets than those that did not include those words. The expected CTAs are on the list: “please retweet” and “please rt” but leading up the list is the somewhat surprising “please help.”
