Researchers at Cornell University are pretty confident that they've come up with a tool that can help you get more retweets, which is obviously the whole point of Twitter. 

The researchers have been working on a study, backed by the National Science Foundation and Google, that harnesses the awesome power of algorithms to help you construct the perfect tweet and get you loads of friends on social media that definitely care about you and you are guaranteed to meet in real life. 

Alright, we may have been slightly sarcastic at the end there, but the research is fairly solid it seems, so much so that they were even able to create an online tool where you can compare different versions of your tweet, and find out which one is more likely to get retweeted. 

The research showed that getting retweets can be as simple as asking followers to retweet, so long as you do so politely. Variations on the words "please" (including "pls" and "plz") and "retweet" were top of the list when it came to getting people to share your tweet. As Mashable found, if you combine those two and include the words "please retweet" in your message, it's 95% more likely to get retweeted, compared to an identical message. 

Pic via Mashable

There are a few caveats with all this, one being that the algorithm is not perfected yet, and doesn't seem to account for things like gibberish and nonsense, but isn't that pretty much everything on Twitter? We jest, but, for example, the algorithm factors the length of a tweet in, but only in a positive way, so adding any old word to the end of your tweet will make it more likely to get retweeted according to the formula. They also found that using language that is familiar to your followers as well as in keeping with the tone of your past tweets helps, so if you suddenly start changing all your tweets to start with "please retweet", it might not work so hot. 

There are a few other tricks of the trade, such as making tweets clearly positive or negative (so that they can be easily sifted through) as well as not making them personal; people don't seem to like when you mention the word "I". We conducted our own experiment, and it seems it also likes buzz words, so if you're claiming that you don't like clicking on those type of tweets, the computer says you're lying to us. Stop lying. 

One final problem, as they admit in the press release about the tool, is that once again they have been unable to get these heartless machines to understand humour, or factor it in to their calculations: "We would love to capture amusingness or cleverness, but we haven't found a way to do that yet".

While Twitter was used for the study thanks to the fact that it does provide solid data (retweets, favourites), researchers are hopeful that the findings can be expanded to cover different forms of communication too, with the team stating in the press release that they were "looking at persuasion everywhere" and not just online. 

Via Mashable