Ever since the rise of social media platforms, marketers have wondered if the terms and phrases that generate the best response in direct marketing also perform as well in the social arena.
One reason why: There have been plenty of experts emphasizing how consumers don’t wish to be “sold” in their social interactions, but instead prefer to develop a relationship of give-and-take with brands.
Now we have some empirical analysis to guide us, conducted by Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist at SaaS inbound marketing firm HubSpot based on reviewing ~200,000 links containing tweets.
Mr. Zarrella found that the tweets that contain more verbs and adverbs experience higher clickthrough rates than noun- and adjective-heavy tweets.
Zarrella’s research also found that when social media posts ask for an explicit action on the part of the recipient, that tends to increase clicks and engagement.
For instance, retweets are three times more likely to happen when people are specifically requested to do so.
Interestingly, the most “retweetable” words in the HubSpot analysis turn out to be the same terms that do well in e-mail marketing and other forms of direct marketing:
- You
- Please
- Post
- Blog / Blog Post
- Free
- Media
- Help
- Great
- How To
- Top
- Check Out
In a parallel research endeavor, a recent evaluation of blog posts by writer and software analytics specialist Iris Shoor reveals how much a post’s title impacts on the volume of “opens.”
In her analysis, Ms. Shoor studied posts on 100 separate blogs, using an evaluation technique that rank-sorted blog posts from the most read to the least shared.
What were the words that resulted in the most opens? Shoor calls them the “blood in the water” terms:
Kill- Fear
- Dark
- Bleeding
- War
- Dead
- Fantasy
Translation? Negative terms are more powerful for shares than more ordinary terms (e.g., positive ones).
It’s very much like the old adage in the newspaper world: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
That’s another takeaway from the most recent research: What’s worked in the offline world over the years appears to be working very much the same way in the online space today.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …
Nones Notes 
The word I’m surprised NOT to see? “Secrets.”
Ever notice how many impulse-buy magazines have phrases such as “eight secrets your doctors won’t tell you,” or “six secrets your lover wishes you knew,” or “three secrets professional investors don’t want you to know”.
I think some people are convinced that their life would be much better if only they were let in on the “secrets” everyone is hiding from them!