Using Twitter But Not Retweeting? How Gauche!

©2009 Doug Champigny. All rights reserved worldwide.

The Advanced Twitter Marketing System makes proper – and heavy – use of the Retweet aspect of Twitter. But even if you’re not using Twitter for Internet marketing or using Twitter for affiliate marketing, you should really be retweeting tweets each and every day. Not retweeting anything is egotistical and, well… gauche!

First, let’s look at what retweeting is, and why it’s necessary to fulfill your implicit promise to those following you on Twitter. The tweets you see streaming by on Twitter are from those people you’ve chosen to follow – and only those people – you create your own Twitterverse that way. And so does everybody else, including those who choose to follow you.

As a result, unless you’re both following the exact same people, each of you is seeing some tweets, probably a goodly percentage, that the others aren’t seeing. And that’s where retweeting comes in. If you see a really helpful, positively encouraging or funny tweet, pass it along to your followers so they can learn from it/visit the site/laugh at it too!

Obviously this passes along greater value to your Twitter followers than just sending them your tweets alone, since they get these as well as your own original tweets. But just taking someone else’s tweet and passing it along as your own is not only in poor taste – it’s one of the specifically prohibited activities that Twitter states it will close your account for. So just what is the correct Twitter etiquette for retweeting the messages you receive?

Assume the tweet in question came from my @SuperAffil stream. Simply highlight and copy the tweet, then in the update window put ‘RT @SuperAffil ‘ (without the quotes) and paste my message in after that. That first bit shows it’s a retweet of a tweet you received from @SuperAffil, and then it shows them what the original tweet said. While this is a bit clumsy in the Twitter.com user interface, 3rd party software like TweetDeck makes it much simpler – in TweetDeck, for instance, hovering your cursor over the tweeter’s avatar brings up 4 small icons, one of which is for retweeting. By just clicking that icon your retweet is put into the update window, ready to send with the proper formatting already done for you.

Hopefully Twitter will eventually add that function directly into their interface, but with most users already interacting with Twitter through 3rd-party software there may not really be a need for them to do so. Twitter growth has been so swift that they have their hands full with server upgrades, spambot checking and now fighting off Denial-of-service attacks, hackers and developers of blackhat software trying to get an unfair advantage at Twitter. However, Biz Stone and his crew have done a fantastic job keeping Twitter intact, growing safely and becoming more and more powerful in it’s usefulness to Twitter users, so don’t be surprised if a retweet function and other user-interface improvements show up from time to time.

So now that you know HOW to retweet, the big question is WHY should you retweet. Let me restate my belief that not retweeting is overly egotistical – you’ve decided no one but you has anything of value to offer your followers, and that they should be left on their own to find valuable tweeters to follow. Conversely, when you pass along the best of the tweets you receive you’re adding more value to the equation, making your stream that much more valuable an asset to those following you. And it also gives your followers a heads-up on other users whose tweets are good enough for you to pass on, giving them an easy way to follow that person as well.

Further, the ‘law of reciprocity’ is alive and well online – when you’re retweeting others, since their @username label is in the tweet they’ll see it too, and that you’ve retweeted them. This gives them a good reason to follow you too, since you’ve shown you feel you’re sending similarly-targeted tweets to your followers. And often they’ll then watch for your tweets, retweeting the best of them in turn and exposing you to their following as well. This ‘Twitter networking’ can be a powerful strategy too, especially if the people you’re retweeting are at the same or higher level in your particular niche. Most Twitter users find having their tweets retweeted flattering, and a bit of flattery to those above you, when genuine and not overdone, can never hurt! ;-)

So as you can see, retweeting helps your followers, enhances the value of your own tweetstream, helps to make the movers & shakers in your niche aware of you, and often leads to your tweets being spread to a wider audience, bringing you more followers and expanding your sphere of influence. This is a win-win situation for anyone using Twitter, but especially powerful for advanced Twitter marketers.

Put the power of retweets to use in YOUR daily Twitter marketing activities today!

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