The @NYTimes Twitter account sent 5,101 tweets from July 1 through the end of September. Luckily for us, researcher Nick Diakopoulos analyzed those tweets and noticed some worthwhile patterns about which one were most retweets.

He drew the following conclusions:

• Tweets with no links got 1.74 more RTs. As Diakopoulos writes, “for news organizations, the most ‘newsy’ or retweetable information comes in a brief snippet, without a link.”
• The most successful tweets were the shorter ones. According to Diakopoulos, 75.8 characters represented the top 10 percent most successful tweets, while the bottom 10 percent were 82.8 characters.
• More verbs and fewer adverbs, qualifiers and articles leads to better tweets.
• The most viral tweets involved crime, natural hazards, sports or political hot-button issues.

Give the full study a look here.

(via Poynter.org)

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