Find Time to Retweet This Cyber Monday!

I hope that this Cyber Monday finds you well and looking ahead to a great week.  This weekend we had a small taste of a February thaw here in New Hampshire, with warmer temperatures and the welcome drip, drip, drip of melting ice.  It reminds me that spring will be coming along sooner rather than later!

This Cyber Monday I wanted to share a little bit about Retweeting.  Simply put, you are retweeting when you quote or re-post someone else’s Tweet, including his or her Twitter name, and preceding it with such codes as “retweet” or “RT.”  I had been puzzled by this but have come upon some articles and Twitter tools that help explain and explore the retweeting phenomenon – a very important one, as you’ll see.

Basically, as Jeremiah Owyang writes in Web Strategy by Jeremiah, retweeting may be the single most powerful aspect of Twitter.  This is because it is the virtual embodiment of “word of mouth.”  If someone else retweets something of yours, it is a big compliment, as it is when you retweet what someone else has written.  The basic message is that this is something you found interesting or important enough to want to repeat.  In his excellent post, Jeremiah summarizes the importance of retweeting as follows:

 … the most powerful activity within Twitter is to watch the “Retweet” phenomenon. A retweet is when one individual copies a tweet from someone in their network and shares it with their network. It’s perhaps the highest degree of content approval, it means that the content was so valuable and important that they were willing to share it with their network -causing it to spread from one community to the next -retweets are the core essence of the viral aspect of content spreading. Early research from Peter Kim indicates that twitter users are brand sensitive, and spread information. Since content can be shared, consumed on mobile devices, this information can rapidly spread faster than any other infectious technology we’ve ever seen.

You can do a search to see how often, and by whom, your tweets (or anyone else’s)  have been retweeted.  Just open up Twitter’s search feature (click the word “search” at the bottom of your “Home” screen) and type in “RT @ your user name.”  In a few moments, the list of retweets will pop up on your screen.  This gives you great information about who is particularly enjoying what you post.

Retweetist is a great tool for tracking everyone’s retweets.  It gives you a window on most-discussed topics on Twitter at any given time. Check it out – it’s nearly always interesting and thought-provoking to see, in real time, what people are tweeting and retweeting.

Do you find time to retweet others’ content on Twitter?  Do your posts often get retweeted?  Pay attention this week, and let me know how it goes … I’d love to hear!

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Let’s explore time together …