How to Optimize Tweets? Cite Trusted Sources and Recognized Brands - Study

On Twitter, the brand currently defining conventions of digital conversation, the source remains the strongest factor in value and quality and trust trumps emotion. New research shows the key factor in predicting a tweet's popularity is the source of the link being tweeted. And just as in search engine optimization, recognizable (brand) names help.

A just-released study from UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs researched four factors and their influence on optimizing tweeted headlines and news links with accuracy 84% of the time:

• The credibility of the news source that generates and posts an article

• The category of news the article falls under (sports, technology, health)

• The subjectivity of the language in the article

• Famous people, brands or other notable entities mentioned.

The data was collected from Feedzilla’s API over nine days and 40,000 news articles, and popularity of articles was measured as the number of times a news URL was posted on Twitter. Using Stanford's Named Entity Recognizer to identify a famous person or company and measure prominence relative to others resulted in a score for each of those 40,000 articles based on the four factors.Continue reading...