SAYING IT AGAIN – MAKING USE OF RETWEETS

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by Kim Niemi

For the past two weeks we’ve been breaking down the three most important areas of focus for your Twitter strategy. Having covered follows and hashtags, we’re finishing up our series this week with a little info on retweets.

With retweets you want to both give and receive. Retweeting others’ tweets helps put you on the radar of the followers of those you’re retweeting. Did you get that? When you retweet, all the people following the person whose tweet you share will see that it came from you. They’ll know that if nothing else, you both have one thing in common: the person whose tweet you chose to retweet. If you’re lucky they’ll check you out to see what you’re about, and follow you.

You need to tweet regularly to build momentum. If you can’t come up with enough original material to post multiple times per day, retweeting is a great way to build visibility – just be sure what you’re retweeting is relevant to your own business.

Here are two versions of the same information retweeted:

The top version was done by copying and pasting the contents of the original tweet, adding “RT” (for “retweet”) and the user name of the original tweeter at the beginning, and then tweaking as needed to allow space for a personal comment with hashtag. This takes an extra moment, but can be beneficial because it adds a little more “you” into the equation. It will also set you apart from others’ retweets of the same material.

The second example was done by simply hitting the retweet button which appears under every post. It retweets the original tweet verbatim, adding only your user name as a link below the tweet. This is fine if you’re in a hurry, don’t have anything to add to the original tweet, or feel that deleting characters from the original tweet in order to add something will compromise its meaning.

Whichever method you use, retweeting is something worth doing.

By the same token, you want to be writing engaging content about your business, and using appropriate and trend-worthy hashtags, to get others retweeting YOU. To this end, it helps to keep tweets in the 100-115-character range, according to social media analyst Dan Zarrella. It makes perfect sense when you think about it. You want to be able to say enough that it’s worth being retweeted, but you want to leave a little space for the retweeter to add their own tagline or hashtag. So keep that in mind as you tweet, and set yourself up with retweetable bits.

If you use these guidelines we’ve laid out for you, you’ll see your Twitter following expand in no time, and with a captive audience following and interacting with all you’re putting out in the Twitterverse, your business will expand as well.