“That’s totally tweetable” — Something I hear myself saying after someone says something funny, outrageous…or anything that I can fit cleverly into 140 characters. But tweets aren’t always formed that way though; whether it’s a tweet coming from your stream of conscious, a news article you found valuable enough to share ,or a picture of a cute corgi pup — we all have our reasons behind what we tweet. However, after we hit the Tweet button, the tweet then has the opportunity for someone to reply, favorite, or retweet.

Retweets are an essential in measuring effectiveness in your tweets, but what causes them? Why do some tweets have hundreds of thousands of retweets and some have zero? What makes a tweet retweetable?

At TrackMaven, we wanted to take a deeper look into what drives a retweet. What is the best time of day to get retweets? Should you use pictures? How about hashtags or mentions? Are there certain characters you should use? Who is the leader on Twitter with huge numbers of retweets?

From time of day to usage of exclamation mark, we’ve uncovered some apparent trends and patterns in this Retweet Report that we’ve put together by looking at over 1,423 Twitter accounts and 1.7 million tweets.

The Retweet Report

Here are some of the questions that we’ve answered about tweets and how they get retweeted…

• What is the best day to get Retweets?
• When is the best time to get Retweets?
• How many hashtags should you use?
• Is there a certain of mentions you should use?
• How do pictures in a tweet affect the number of Retweets?
• Where should you position your link in your tweet?
• What’s the difference between Retweet and RT?
• Does the number of uppercase letters or exclamation marks affect Retweets?
• Is there a relationship in the number of followers vs. the number of Retweets?

Curious to know the answers? Download a copy of our Retweet Report below!