3 Tactics to Increase the Number of Retweets on Your Blog

This post is part of the weekly Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Melvin asks:

I am using the TweetMeme button and the problem is I am not getting that many retweets for my posts. My followers count 780, but I think I mm getting enough views for my posts that 10 retweets should be the average count. I don’t think my content sucks that much as well. Any opinion to share?

First of all you need to keep in mind that only a small percentage of people who are coming across your post will take the time to retweet it (or Stumble it, Digg it, email it to a friend and so on). This comes from the fact that people are busy, lazy, or unaware about the feature in question.

For example, I noticed that on some of my posts the retweets to views ratio is around 1/100. So for every 100 views that my posts get, one reader will take the time to retweet it. I would guess that your ratio is close to that. For some people it will be 0,5%, for others as high as 3%, but it will always be a small percentage no matter what.

If you want to get a substantial increase in the average retweets you get per post, therefore, aim to increase your traffic.

That being said, there are some tactics that you can use to increase the retweet ratio on your blog without necessarily increasing your traffic. And keep in mind that these tactics also work for other purposes (e.g., if you want people to subscribe to your RSS feed, to download your ebook and so on).

1. Educate

As I mentioned before, many people will not retweet your posts because they are not familiar with that feature. They might not know Twitter, and even if they do they might not know what a retweet is.

If want more retweets, you could teach your audience about Twitter and retweets. Write a post on the topic, include screenshots, explain the benefits of using those tools and so on.

2. Emphasize

If you want people to do something, you got ask them. This is one of the golden rules of marketing.

If you want more retweets, say so. Practically speaking you could position your retweet button in a more visible position, and you could also put a message close to it saying: “Liked this post? Please help to spread the word by retweeing it!”.

3. Reciprocate

If you want people to help you, help them out first. If you want more retweets, retweet more posts from other bloggers.

You could also be frank with this tactic. That is, you could contact some of your friends by email and mention that you will start retweeting their posts, and asking if they would be willing to do the same.

Over to the readers

Do you have any other tip to increase the number of retweets on a blog? If so, share with us with a comment.

Ah, and please retweet this post if you liked it!