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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.

• Want more likes and comments on Tumblr? Here’s how to get them

  Another social network that has become very popular in the past few years but is marked by a lack of marketing data is Tumblr. It’s a fertile petri dish for some of the web’s most contagious content and has a fascinatingly wide demographic profile. And with the added buzz it’s getting from the much-talked about Yahoo acquisition, social media professionals should not ignore it.Gnip gave me access to the Tumblr firehose a little while back and I used it to ...

• Want retweets? Here are the 7 most powerful calls to action

  I’m a big fan of social calls-to-action. Previously, I’ve found evidence that they work on Facebook and Twitter. So I wanted to expand my research and see if I could find more words and phrases that were good at spurring people to social action.Using a huge data set of more than 2.7-million tweets provided to me by the awesome folks at Buffer, I analysed the use of calls-to-action (like “please retweet”) and their relationship to retweets. To control for number ...

• Winning at Instagram is all about hashtags [Infographic]

  One of the quickest growing social media platforms on the web at the moment is Instagram, but there’s a lack of marketing data about it. I decided to collect data on just over 1 million images posted to the site and found several interesting takeaways. The first, which you’ll find in the infographic below, is the importance of hashtags.Not only do images that include hashtags get more likes than images that do not, there are certain hashtags that are correlated ...

• Turns out email subscription popups really do work

  I’ve had several conversations about the email subscription popups new visitors to sites are likely to see. Many of the most experienced people in the business are in favour of them. The results are also focused are in their favour, but there are some “marketing gurus” who are very vocal in their opposition. Never one to leave a debate like this to gut feeling and guesswork, I decided to actually look at my own stats to see what story they ...

• 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.

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