#034 – GUEST – Dr Torgeir Aleti, PhD
How to get Retweeted - with SCIENCE!

Published on November 5, 2018

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This episode comes with SCIENCE! And the science comes courtesy of Dr Togeir Aleti, digital marketing lecturer at RMIT. Today, he’s here to talk about his new research paper (he’s written quite a few) that looks at what sort of tweets get retweeted and why. So, if you’re looking to lift your twitter storytelling game, here’re are some tips all backed with real data. Imagine!

How do you get your audience to remember your content or even to get them to act upon it? Throw reams of factual data and facts at them in a steady, unyielding stream over the course of an afternoon. Yeah, do that if your goal is send your audience to sleep.

How many of us can rememeber bedtime stories as kids? I lived for storytime and it is no coincidence. Multiple studies have shown that we as human beings retain a d share information best via a story. And it is those emotional connections that we form with our storytellers that gives them cultural capital to have an ‘authority to speak’.

Lift your Twitter storytelling

So according to Dr Aleti (he actually insists that we just call him Tor), there are a few factors that will make your 280 characters reach out across the interwebs and get someone to feel enough to want to retweet your tweet.

Narrative Transportation is one. Wrap your information in a ‘story shell’ and draw your audience in.

Emotional arousal is the other. Your tweet needs to elicit a strong emotional response. Negative or positive, it doesn’t matter. However, it seems that tweets with positive emotions tend to have a longer halflife.

Check out this list of the most retweeted tweets on Wikipedia. Note that the figures quoted are in ‘thousands’ with the top tweet looking at 3.5 million retweets (as of 5th Nov 2018).

What does this mean for my content marketing strategy?

In one sentence. Tell stories. Every tweet,  post, blog or pic should tell a story of some kind. And if that is giving you the sweats…hire an author/story-teller/writer to do it for you. Caveat: You’re gonna then have to let go and let them channel you and your brand.

Who is Torgeir Aleti?

What does he actually do? How many research papers has he really written? What does he think of craft beer? Does he really have a moustache? He sounds like he does…

The answers to these scintillating questions can be found on his website.

Go on. You know you’re curious to put a face behind the accent.

PS We’ve learned a lot just by being in the same room as him.