How to Make Your Tweets More Trustworthy [STUDY]

Ever feel like you tweet something important, but no one believes you?
A recent study shows you how to boost the credibility of your tweets, making people take them more seriously. And it’s not just marketing fluff; the study was conducted by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University. 

Among the lessons for how to get trustworthy tweets: Gain followers and retweets, include URLs in your posts, have a profile picture, and fill out your bio with information related to topics you tweet about.
The researchers surveyed more than 250 Twitter users to determine what factors do and don’t lend tweets credibility. Then they scored that group of factors on a scale of one to five, five being the highest.
Here are the top 10 things that make tweets more trustworthy, along with their respective scores:

1. Post was retweeted by someone you trust – 4.08
2. Author is a subject expert – 4.04
3. You follow the author – 4.00
4. Tweet contains a URL you clicked through – 3.93
5. Author is someone you’ve heard of – 3.93
6. Account has verification seal – 3.92
7. Author often tweets on topic – 3.74
8. Author’s tweets frequently include similar content – 3.71
9. Author’s user image is a personal photo – 3.70
10. Author is often mentioned and/or retweeted – 3.69

And here are the five least gravitas-lending factors for tweets:

1. Non-standard grammar and/or punctuation 2.71
2. Profile picture is Twitter’s default user image – 2.87
3. User image is a cartoon or avatar – 3.22
4. Author follows many users – 3.30
5. Author’s user image is a logo – 3.37

Do these findings match how you deem a tweet trustworthy or not? What ranks first for you? Let us know in the comments.  
And click here to check out the Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon researchers’ full report. 


by Sam Laird

mashable.com