Posted by Charlie Carter on 23.09.2009

The Art of The Retweet

To RT or not to RT, that is the question.

RT (for those unfamiliar with the abbreviation) stands for retweet and if you’ve ever come across anything interesting, funny or simply worth sharing to your followers you may have ‘retweeted a tweet’ at some point.

A retweet in basic terms is to repeat/cite a message (a tweet) by somebody on Twitter. There are a few ways to achieve this but the most common method is to begin the tweet with ‘RT’ followed by the username of the person who tweeted it and finally duplicate the content of the original message.

For example:

RT @Bluewire_Media: New blog post about retweeting!

The process isn’t perfect. It’s slightly awkward and sometimes a little daunting for new users.

Twitter is well aware of the value of a retweet and actively encourages it. At the same time however, Twitter wants to take out some of the guess work and help streamline the whole process. To assist in achieving this goal they have announced Project Retweet, an official built-in retweet feature to be implemented into the social networking service in the coming weeks (if not days).

A sketch of Project Retweet by Twitter founder, Biz Stone

Now that we all know how to retweet and also understand that Twitter is about to make the process a lot easier, here’s the next thing to consider: “how do I get retweeted?”

Dan Macsai over at fastcompany.com takes an in-depth look about the not-so-simple-science of observing your “retweetability” by studying a few facts and stats from Dan Zarella’s: The Science of ReTweets.

Here is a list of the top 20 best and worst words that can affect your own “retweetability”.

Most ReTweetable Words & Phrases

1. You

2. Twitter

3. Please

4. Retweet

5. Post

6. Blog

7. Social

8. Free

9. Media

10. Help

11. Please retweet

12. Great

13. Social media

14. 10

15. Follow

16. How to

17. Top

18. Blog post

19. Checkout

20. New blog post

Least ReTweetable Words & Phrases

1. Game

2. Going

3. Haha

4. Lol

5. But

6. Watching

7. Work

8. Home

9. Night

10. Bed

11. Well

12. Sleep

13. Gonna

14. Hey

15. Tomorrow

16. Tired

17. Some

18. Back

19. Bored

20. Listening

The retweet is certainly a powerful tool for many Twitter users due simply to the fact of how quickly you can spread and share interesting conversations online. With some understanding on how to perfect the art of the retweet you will ultimately gain more from your experiences and add even more value your networks.

Social Media Brisbane: If you would like to know more how social networking can assist your business please contact us on 1300 258 394.

Follow Bluewire Media on Twitter!

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Posted on 23.09.2009 at 12:46 pm. See other posts by Charlie Carter View Comments
Trends, social media, twitter.

search engine optimization

Its definitely a great tool as if your blog has been retwitted by someone on twitter it'll be additional visits from people who followed that person. :D

Annabelle

What a great post, never really thought of what was behing retweeting but it all certainly makes sense. Those top non-retweetable keywords were very true, "Bed, Listening..." etc no one wants to rt what people are doing; no one essentially cares - twitter's not abut that.

Adam Franklin

Hi Charlie,

Nice debut post!

Another tip I've learnt for encouraging RTs is to keep your tweet short enough so that the retweeter has enough characters to include RT @dangercharlie at the start and not lose any of the original message.

And here is an interesting article that takes us through the process of making a tweet more punchy, credible, and viral through 5 rounds of redesign.

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/twitter-iteration...

Cheers.

Charlie Carter

Thanks Adam

I know what you mean about keeping the message short. Unfortunately a username such as mine being 13 characters long can be a pain for anyone retweeting me I'm sure!