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Dan Zarrella

Dan Zarrella is an award-winning social, search, and viral marketing scientist at HubSpot and author of two O’Reilly Media books: “The Social Media Marketing Book” and The Facebook Marketing Book.He has a background in web development and combines his programming capabilities with a passion for social marketing to study social media behavior from a data-backed position and teach marketers scientifically grounded best practices.

RECENT POSTS

• How you can use Twitter to map people’s emotions

  There are all sorts of tools out there for measuring social media sentiment. They're incredibly useful to brands and journalists alike. But what if you could use Twitter to map people's emotions geographically? Surely that would be even more usefulA few weeks ago, I spoke at a federal agency conference in Arlington, Viriginia and one of the most interesting topics was the potential use of social media, by intelligence agencies, to map out and predict social unrest. So I ...

• How to get more pins and repins on Pinterest [Infographic]

  Data about Pinterest is sparse because it's been slow to release its API, but I was able to utilise search engine APIs to pull some data about the trendy new social site. I gathered information on over 11 000 pinned images and did some analysis to create the infographic below.This data should be useful for Pinterest users who’d like to get more repins on the images they’ve pinned, as well as content producers who want their content pinned and repinned ...

• The ‘science’ of Christmas online

  Science makes everything better. Seriously, it’s a proven fact. So of course I did some analysis about Christmas and found some surprising insights. Don’t get fooled by the unicorns-and-rainbows myths about the holidays anymore. Here’s the science.The figures compiled here are the most authoritative view you'll get on the social influence of reindeer, gift buying and just how which social networks you're on affect where you'll be placed on Santa's "naughty or nice" list. Enjoy and Merry Christmas and ...

• 10 words and phrases that can help or harm your Twitter click through rate

  After compiling a dataset of more than 200 000 link-containing tweets to generate a Click Through Rate (CTR) heatmap, I decided to dig into what words, phrases and characters correlate with higher (or lower) CTR. Below are my findings. And yes, I know correlation isn’t causation, but to quote Edward Tufte: "It sure is a hint." The first "word" I analysed was the hashtag. I found that there is very little difference in the CTR of a link whether it ...

• 20 of the most (and least) connected words on LinkedIn

  I’ve studied data from a variety of social media platforms, but never LinkedIn. So a few days ago I got around to playing with it a little bit and found a few interesting things.First, I looked at the words in the title and summary of more than 40 000 randomly selected profiles and how they correlated with the number of connections those profiles have. I found that there are a handful of highly connected positions (unsurprisingly investors and recruiters) as ...

• 5 scientifically proven ways to get more retweets on Twitter [Infographic]

  Over the years, I've done a ton of research on retweets.I've found five specific points that are the most powerful ways to get more retweets, so I rolled them up into one simple infographic. If you're curious where this data came from, check out the two links in the first paragraph, which explain the research surrounding the science of retweets.

• Data: Tweet lots of links to get followers

  As I've said before, "if you’ve seen me speaking, or read my stuff, you may know that one of my favourite past times is busting social media marketing myths, and one of my favourite examples of 'unicorns and rainbows' advice is 'engage in the conversation'".My effort to analytically study the unicorns-and-rainbows myth of “engaging in the conversation” started by looking at the relationship between the number of followers a user has and the percentage of their Tweets that are ...

• Viral Math: The mathematics behind social media engagement and reach

  Over the past few years I’ve developed two models of contagious content: R0 (pronounced: R Naught) and Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness. Because of the way these two systems work, I put a lot of emphasis on reach building activities (getting lots of followers, likes and views) and metrics (number of followers and likes).Based on the reaction I’ve seen to some of my recent work challenging the hegemony of “engaging in the conversation,” I’ve come to understand that I may not ...

• 33% of Facebook posting is mobile

  Some stats have been published, by researchers and the company themselves, about mobile usage of Facebook. But to content creators, one of the most important uses of the social network is when users create posts, sometimes posting original content, often sharing articles and media found elsewhere on the web. I was unable to find much data about how much of this activity occurs via mobile devices, so I decided to research my own.I used a random sample set of more ...

• Five researched ways to get more followers [Infographic]

  For marketers the most important use of Twitter is to increase your reach to spread your content. To do this, you need to get more followers. Sure there are customer service uses of Twitter, but for marketing purposes, follower count is key.I’ve been doing research for a few years now on how to get more followers, and here are some of the most important points I’ve found. You can find graphical details about each point in the infographic (below).Show us ...

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