How Do I Retweet Most Effectively? #tweelogathon

Before I go on I must explain what #tweelogathon is.

Now that’s done, let’s look at “How Do I Retweet Most Effectively.”

The Mechanics of a Retweet
Retweeting is a community convention to let others know you have something of value to say. This is done like so normally:
RT @jointwinwin: I said something of note and this needs to be told to others

Twitter itself does not do provide this functionality, you would have to copy and paste the original message into the status area and prepend the RT @jointwinwin.

Some people also use the longer form Retweet: form but given you have only 140 characters to play with, the shorter RT is by far the more popular.

Many of the Twitter clients (such as TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Seesmic etc…) have this functionality which is a real boon and saves you from the extra cut and paste necessary.

Indeed using Twitter without a good Twitter client is like trying to push water uphill with a straw.

What To Retweet
You should look to retweet something you find interesting and more importantly your followers will find interesting.

Now in an ideal world, the tweet you want for this to happen would be about your business. So in my world, I would like to tweet something which talks about making a difference using cause related marketing – it’s worthy but not necessarily with viral retweet capability straight out of the box.

I’m guessing you have a business which is not necessarily viral in nature straight out of the box – true?

So, if that’s the case, you have to look at a more oblique strategy – by getting your tweets retweeted, or even your retweets retweeted, you are getting exposure in terms of display on other people’s Twitter streams so there is a possibility the followers of your followers will follow you because you have brought something worthwhile to their attention.

You are laying the foundations of establishing yourself as somewhat of an authority in their minds (albeit the tiniest of footsteps on that path).

If you’re retweeting yourself, you are getting yourself on the radar (however fleetingly) of the originator who may be happy you have helped spread the word (some people may find this a disingenuous tactic – or at least suspect you are looking for more out of it from a reciprocity perspective than it warrants).

So, what are the types of content people find interesting and most retweetable. The below list is inspired by the post 6 Types of Tweets That Get Retweeted.

Quotes -Without doubt these are some of the easiest things to retweet and very often are picked up and retweeted by others. This is a no-brainer way to use Twitter and indeed many people just load up automated Twitter software to blast these out on a regular or irregular way. Simple, yes, effective for retweeting – relatively but ultimately should be used sparingly or people will see you’re just a one quote pony.
Funny - Humour/Humor goes a long way and it’s good to interject some humour into your tweets. Again, your humour may not resonate with that of your followers so if you drop a big one and see digital tumbleweeds enter your Twitter stream, you have been warned. With that said, this makes me smile:

Trends - Twitter is the current Zeitgeist of what’s happening on the planet, you could call it the social planetary pulse, trends are transient so if you are to utilise this strategy, you will need to be in early on the trend to get maximum exposure.
News - Love it or loathe it, news sells – or from a more downbeat/pessimistic perspective, bad news sells. It’s nice to have an uplifting news item but they rarely have the viral retweet capacity of those of a negative slant. Imagine the viral nature of breaking the news of an impending asteroid crash on Earth – 20,000,000 retweets in the space of an hour, your Twitter name immortalised and gone just as quickly – the most extreme example you can think of I admit but you get the drift.
Tips and How To Info - Practical information on how to do something is of enormous value and use to your followers – if of course they are interested. There’s no point showing them how to sew if all they want to hear about is the latest news on Call Of Duty gaming.
Questions - It’s got to be good, you need to engage the grey cells on the other side of the Twitterverse screens to respond to your questions or if the question is “worthy enough” to retweet it to their list. Closed questions (with a Yes/No answer) don’t suit this type of strategy.
Creative Tweets – The world is your lobster when it comes to this type of tweet, use your noodle to come up with prime examples.

Should You Retweet Business or Marketing Materials?
Of course there are die-hard Tweeple out there who believe social networks should be 100% free from any kind of marketing or advertising messages.

God bless them is all I can say, money makes the world go round and services such as Twitter, Friendfeed and all the others out there would never have come to light without a monetisation aspect being realised (granted this takes a long time for some).

So, does this mean you as an entrepreneur or business owner should use Twitter to broadcast incessant marketing messages in the form of tweets and retweets?

Of course not, indeed, there’s nothing wrong with the introduction of a self serving message every so often but you have to give before you can get.

There are different schools of thought on this in terms of how much you should give before you can take, the ratio is up to you – some say 19 “giving” messages to 1 self serving (the “Jeff Pulver” Rule), others such as @ChrisBrogan have been quoted as saying 12 messages to 1, whilst others still advocate a more aggressive ratio.

The decision is yours, the results will tell you whether your aggression level is set too high or too low in terms of results you get versus negative feedback (where negative feedback may be none at all in terms of followers).

Optimal Retweeting Results
So, you have something you’d like to retweet – how do you get it retweeted. There are a number of things you can do.

Make sure it’s retweetable as per above examples
Keep it short – the message needs to be powerful and short to allow for people to comment, each retweet adds more characters to the message and something has got to give at the end of the day – use URL Shorteners
The URL shortener you use can have a significant impact on your retweet success – see Dan Zarrella’s article on the URL Shortener’s that get retweeted the most (familiarity with URL shortener’s has an impact here)
Include a Retweet mechanism on your blog – use a service like Tweetmeme for example, the more retweets you get, the more you’re likely to get due to social proof kicking in. Remember we all react in a herd like fashion.

Related Resources:
How To Retweet: A Simple Guide

The Science of Retweets

And one not so small thing to bear in mind. Twitter have officially decided to incorporate the retweeting capability into it’s own interface, alas it looks like this may be a flawed implementation as there has been a vocal outcry from many in the know.

To find out more and hopefully persuade Twitter to not fix because it’s not broken, see how you can help to #saveretweets.

All the best,

Tom

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