A “retweet” on Twitter, sometimes called an “RT“, is the most common form of promoting content written by someone else and sharing it with your followers. Any great link, information, or insight is potentially retweetable, and there are a few courtesies and conventions on how to do it properly.
There are many reasons for you to retweet compelling content, not to mention creating retweetable material of your own. Examples include attracting more followers, increasing your personal relevance among your followers (depending on the content of the original tweet itself), and even being placed on a one or more Twitter lists. I’ve personally seen all 3 of those examples happen to my @halfbrown account after posting content on Twitter. Increased followers and popularity is all about great content (unless you’re a celebrity, in which case your existence alone on Twitter can get you followers), and retweeting that content helps everybody.
There are two common ways to properly retweet, and each method is detailed below:
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Using the Twitter RT:
Twitter added their own retweet functionality in late 2009 to mixed reviews, and love it (or at least have a “glass half full” view of it) or hate it, it looks like it’s here to stay. To retweet using the Twitter-supplied way, simply mouseover the tweet you want to RT and look in the bottom right-hand side of the tweet. You should see 2 options, “Reply” And “Retweet”. (See the graphic below for an example.)
Just click on the “Retweet” link and a confirmation saying “Retweet to your followers?” will appear. If change your mind on the retweet, simply click the “X” to close the confirmation, otherwise click the “Yes” button to retweet it. When you click “Yes” the tweet is sent out to your stream like your other tweets, but shows up as being from the original tweeter user (their profile’s avatar is used, etc.) with text at the bottom showing it as retweeted by you.
The up side to using the Twitter RT method is ease-of-use and automated attribution of the original poster. The down side of using it is that you can’t add any additional comments. I like to use this method of retweeting when I don’t have anything to add to the mix and just want to quickly pass the info along to my Twitter followers.
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Creating a manual RT:
Before Twitter added their retweet functionality the only way to RT was to do it by hand. It’s a little more complicated than the Twitter RT method, but it gives you more control over what’s shown and how it displays. The basics are simple:
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Find a compelling tweet to send to your followers:
Chances are good that if you have real followers who like what you usually have to say, they’ll be interested in most things you’d want to retweet.
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Copy+paste the content of the tweet into your status update field:
Sometimes you’ll need to strategically trim a few words to get under the 140 character limit. Just try to stay as true to the original content as possible and no one should mind. If you have room left over, feel free to add your own commentary or maybe a relevant hashtag. The former will help increase your engagement with the original tweeter, and the latter will expose you to a few more folks searching for that hashtag who otherwise may not have found you.
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Retweeting etiquette calls for crediting the original tweeter:
This usually in the form of an “@” which, when prepended to a Twitter username, auto-links to that person’s Twitter page. Prepend the previous step with the following: “RT @username “, where “username” is replaced with the username of the person who originally tweeted the content. Make sure to add a space after the username so the original poster will get properly linked and credited!
The upside to using the manual RT method is the control you have of the content (adding hashtags, comments, etc.). The downside of using it is the potential for broken or missing attribution of the original tweeter and sometimes having to change the original content to conform to the 140 character Twitter limit. I like to engage with my followers and the original tweeters, so I prefer to use this method.
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Find a compelling tweet to send to your followers:
Regardless of which method you use, as long as you’re retweeting quality content and you give credit where credit is due, a good retweet has a lot of value to you, your followers, and the person you’re retweeting.
Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/creativecommons/ / CC BY 2.0
