Over the past few years, I’ve conducted a number of focus groups on subjects ranging from email marketing to blogging.
When I ask participants why they’ve chosen to receive emails from a particular source, read a specific blogger, or follow a certain Twitter user, they give me a variation on the same answer:
“Because I like their unique point of view.”
Readers will only listen to you if you’re giving them something they can’t find anywhere else.
Why would they pay attention to you if you’re saying the same things that everyone one else is saying?
That’s common sense — but is there evidence that supports it? Actually, yes there is.
My numbers-based research has confirmed the importance of uniqueness and novelty. The data shows that novelty is contagious; ordinariness is not.
If you take a look at the graphic below, you’ll see that Retweets contain more unusual words than ordinary Tweets do.
No, that doesn’t mean the word commonness gets Retweeted less often. 
It means that Tweets with uncommon words get Retweeted more often than the usual things we see every day. Having a unique way of expressing yourself will earn you more Retweets.
Escape the echo chamber
Your readers don’t want you to say the same things everyone else is saying.
If you simply regurgitate information from the echo chamber, they won’t spread your content, and eventually they’ll get bored and stop listening.
Heeding this advice, it could then be easy to conclude that you should talk about yourself as much as possible. Because after all, what is a more unique perspective than what you’re doing, thinking, and feeling?
Well, that’s a little right, but mostly wrong.
First of all, when I’ve studied Twitter accounts, I’ve found a negative correlation between self-reference and number of followers.
In other words, the more you talk about yourself, the fewer people are interested in following you.
And when you’re talking about individual Tweets, Retweets tend to contain much less self-reference than ordinary non-contagious Tweets.
People don’t want to listen to you Tweet about yourself all day long, and they’re certainly not going to Retweet it either.
So where does all of this lead us?
People want to hear our unique perspectives and points of view. But they don’t want to listen to us talk about ourselves.
Talk as yourself, not about yourself
Your take on industry news is interesting. Your daily minutiae is not.
Your unique analysis of best practices is something I’d like to read. Your regurgitation of time-worn adages is not.
Whether it’s your personal brand or a corporate brand, you have a set of characteristics and perspectives that allow you to look at the world in a novel way. Use that.
About the Author: Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist. For more social media science like this, buy Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness on Amazon. It’s $7.99 for the Kindle version (which will work on any computer or device) — and if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can even read it for free.
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Is Your Social Media Strategy Stalling Because You’re Not Doing This One Thing?
by Dan Zarrella on August 17, 2011
Marketers of most stripes know how important and powerful calls-to-action are.
If you want someone to take a specific action, you have to actually ask them to take that specific action.
But, it seems like social media marketers have either forgotten CTAs, or rejected them altogether.
A researcher by the name of Irving Kirsch at the University of Connecticut did an interesting experiment with hypnotically suggestable people.
Half of the subjects were put under full hypnotic trance and given a stack of 30 post cards.
They were given the hypnotic command to mail one card back to the lab each day for 30 days.
The other half of the subjects were simply asked nicely, given social requests without hypnosis to do the same.
Can you guess which group mailed more postcards back?
The second group ended up mailing more cards back. Social requests can be just as powerful as full-out hypnotic suggestions.
So why are social media marketers afraid of them?
The power words of blog commenting
When I studied blogging, I found that blog posts that included the word “comments” typically got more comments than blog posts that did not.
Take a look at this graph displaying the most commented-on words:
This is very simple, very powerful stuff.
If you want readers to comment on your blog, you have to ask them.
The power of the call to action
The most powerful evidence of the power of social calls-to-action is how effective “please retweet” is.
I studied a a statistically significant sample set of more than 10,000 tweets and found that those that used the phrases “please retweet” or “please rt” were much more likely to be retweeted.
In the case of the longer “please retweet” the tweets were four times more likely to be shared by followers.
I’m not exactly sure why there is so much resistance in social media marketing circles to calls to action, but now you know the truth.
Calls to action work!
And here’s one for you: Get more social media data and mythbusting information by registering for the Science of Social Media webinar coming on August 23rd. Register today!
About the Author: Dan Zarrella is HubSpot’s Social Media Scientist. This post contains data from his upcoming webinar The Science of Social Media, taking place this Tuesday, August 23rd. Sign up now!
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