The Power Of A Retweet

Morning Everyone,

So it’s been a wee while since I wrote a post about my most favourite social networking site, so I thought today would be an ideal opportunity to do so.

The focus of this post is the Twitter ‘retweet’ and I want to give you a few tips that can help you create a more powerful retweet.

But firstly, what exactly is a ‘Retweet’

This is Twitter’s answer to giving someone a ‘shout out’ So when you see someone that you follow tweet something that you like, find of value/interesting, or even funny you can show your appreciation for this by broadcasting that tweet to your followers.

This of course works both ways, so if you are posting things on twitter, you may well find that your followers are also showing their appreciation by doing the exact same to you (providing of course you aren’t tweeting complete gibberish that has no value / benefit to your followers)

Like everything today, there are of course ways in which you can improve how you use the retweet facility that can give you a better chance in your tweets going viral across the network (and obviously this is the name of the game – maximum exposure)

Here is an example of a retweet that I have recently shared in the account for Affordable Printing

In some Social Media dashboards you might see that retweet look a little something like this

@APC_Printing RT @neondigital “Are you looking to get into the web design industry? Check out our handy tips!” 
#SouthendHour ow.ly/wKqV8 #webdesign#tips

Let me break this down for you:

RT = retweet = your followers know instantly that this information hasn’t come direct from you, but you have shared this via someone else.

@neondigital = this simply credits the person you are quoting (@ + their name)

“Are you looking to get into the web design industry? Check out our handy tips!”  = A Compelling Headline (that will entice people to want to read more)

A URL of where your followers can read the article.

Most of us simply hit the ‘retweet’ button and the tweets are shared exactly like the image above.

BUT WHAT IF YOU WANT TO MAKE MORE OF AN IMPACT?

You can make a few tweaks / changes to the content, to try and entice others to WANT to share it with their followers, because the more its’ retweeted, the better chance you have of the post going Viral.

Try looking at it like this:

Are you looking to get into the web design industry? Check out our handy tips! ow.ly/wKqV8 RT @neondigital  – Great tips!!! 

Here are my 7 steps to creating a more powerful retweet

1. MOVE THE HEADLINE – For maximum impact the headline needs to be at the front of the tweet – a compelling start will entice people to read on and click through.
2. ALWAYS INCLUDE THE NAMES OF OTHERS MENTIONED IN ARTICLE/TWEET – If other people are mentioned in the content you are retweeting or sharing, its polite and good karma to mention their username in the post.  The reason for doing this is so that it draws attention to all people the tweet has relevance too, which by the nature of how twitter works would encourage them to retweet to their followers, thus expanding the reach of your tweet.
3. ALWAYS INCLUDE THE URL AFTER THE HEADLINE WITH A URL SHORTENER – Always remember, you are restricted to 140 characters, so you need to ensure that you are using tinyurl or bitly to shorten external web links
4. MOVE ‘RT’ & ORIGINAL POST USER TO AFTER THE LINKS – This means you can still credit the original person posting it, but are shifting the entire focus towards the headline and the link.
5. ADD YOUR OWN COMMENT TO THE POST – So important to include your own ‘voice’ – show appreciation, opinion – remember Social Media is all about collaborating and sharing ideas so people want to see you have actually paid attention and not just hit ‘retweet’ without actually looking into what you are retweeting!
6. INCLUDE A HASHTAG – SO SO SO important!!! Hash tags are searched, and by adding a relevant one to the retweet, your are categorising the tweet. People have streams set up for their industry and interests by hash tags, so by adding one you are automatically giving your post a higher chance of being seen by people outside of your followers.
7. KEEP IT SIMPLE – 140 characters is NOT a lot of words to play with, so don’t waffle … keep it short | simple and to the point. And if you want others to retweet it, leave enough characters for someone else to add their own bit to it!

I hope that you can put some of these tips into practice the next time you are going to retweet information, and pay attention to the new followers / and shares that you get! – It’s always worth looking into and checking what works and what doesn’t – a really great way of connecting and using these is by checking out Twitter networking hours – which I am a massive advocate of, and wrote a long list of all the networking hours in the UK which are worth looking at. If you want to check that then please click here.