The Way You Tweet Pictures Drastically Affects Your Retweets [Chart]

If you are a social media manager, you know the important role that sharing visual content plays in social media success. If you want a real-life example, you don’t have to look any further than the Bit Rebels Facebook page where Richard has become a master of sharing the kind of visual content (pictures, comics, etc.) that our fans crave. However, when it comes to Twitter, there is another detail in the equation for success that is important to consider before you tweet pictures.

If you tweet pictures on Twitter as part of your social media marketing, you obviously hope your followers will engage with that content. You will be able to gauge your success at pinpointing the kind of visual content your followers like by the number of retweets and comments you receive.

However, what you might not have thought about before now is how the method you use to tweet pictures will affect your retweets. I often see people tweet pictures that have a Facebook link to the photo. I understand that strategy, and if the content is good, I’m sure over time that probably increases Facebook likes.

But let’s get back to Twitter and the number of retweets you’ll get…Instagram links, Facebook links and Twitpic links all get significantly lower retweets than visual content uploaded through pic.Twitter.com (Twitter’s native image uploading system). When you look at the differences in the chart below, you’ll be blown away.

This chart is called Images Get Retweets (by Dan Zarrella). You can click over on Dan’s link to read more about how he came to these results. His data set contained over 400,000 tweets, and he based it on the number of ‘new/native’ retweets (not the old style retweets). I hope this information helps you increase your Twitter retweets significantly!

How You Tweet Pictures Really Makes A Difference