How To Retweet on Twitter: Retweet, Retweeting

Many individuals, companies, and bloggers use Twitter as a promotion vehicle for their websites and products. There are tons of articles on this and, as such, I thought I’d focus on a tactic within Twitter that I think is underutilized by most: promoting other Twitter user’s content by “retweeting” it. When a Twitter user updates their Twitter account, this is called a “Tweet”. If you are reading another user’s “Tweets” and you see something of interest, you can promote the exact same “Tweet” to your followers by employing a “retweet”.

The concept of “retweeting” can best be distilled down to this concept: Take a Twitter message someone else has posted and rebroadcast that same message to your followers. Proper “netiquette” dictates that when rebroadcasting this message, you give credit to the original poster. While retweeting sounds great for the original tweeter (since there is usually a link involved), retweeting can actually benefit you just as much, if not more- and that’s what I’d like to touch on.

How to Properly Retweet

Retweeting is very simple. Here’s a quick how-to for you to understand how to properly retweet:

The common syntax starts off with the use of the label: “Retweet”. People also sometimes label their Twitter message starting with “Retweeting”. Either works. The next piece of  your Twitter message is the credit. You can credit the original poster by simply using the @reply syntax, for example: “@originalTweeter”.

Lastly, you should add the link or post message from the original Tweet along with a brief commentary about the link and why it is relevant. Here is a full example of retweeting:

Retweet: @originalTweeter I just found the best blog in the world!! http://tinyurl.com/d9b8gs

It’s that simple. Soooo…. why exactly should you care about retweeting? Read on…

The Benefits of the Retweet

1. Retweeting provides quality content to your followers on Twitter. If you have a profile on Twitter that is more individually focused, people will follow you on Twitter to keep tabs on what you’re up to and what you find interesting online. Because your followers will generally know you in real life, they get along with you and share your tastes and interests. Therefore, the items you Tweet about will appeal to them. Retweets will most likely be in line with what you find interesting and therefore, they’ll appreciate the increased breadth of items tweeted and retweeted. People also follow entities on Twitter that represent businesses or more commercially focused individuals. They follow these “people” on Twitter to gain some sort of value. As a business entity, you can retweet items that are complimentary to what your followers are expecting from you to provide them more value and keep them engaged with a higher frequency of communication.
2. Retweeting will most likely build your “social media” persona brand and increase loyalty to your social media persona.  If you point a follower to an external source that is highly relevant to them, the amount of trust that individual has in your persona will increase. This snowballs as you retweet more links that continue to be relevant to your followers and in line with the reasons they began following you to begin with. The next time you post a link, whether it be a retweet externally or to one of your Internet properties or articles the higher the likelihood your followers will click the links. Do not abuse this trust and you will become an authority and wield the ability to drive traffic to high value content by mere mention.
3. Retweeting provides value to your followers, additionally it catches the attention of the original tweeter or content producer being linked to. Directing traffic to these sources is an act of kindness and active content producers, bloggers, and micro-bloggers tend to return such acts. The more energy you put into driving relevant valuable content to people who are interested in, the more you’ll get back yourself (Google model anyone?)

Happy re-tweeting everyone!!

Update: Just surfing on Linked-In and came across Mitch Joel’s post about Retweeting in the context of branding success. Check out his stuff too. 

Also check out Retweetist for a whole site dedicated “retweet” measurement and tracking. You can also see who the top Twitter users are who have their tweets retweeted the most.

Funny Or Die!! Sanchez.

While I don’t know why exactly a comedy site that distributes original content from established comedians via the Internet has earth-shattering new technology necessitating the label “beta”, I’ll put aside any concern and enjoy a laugh or two on Funny or Die. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s Gary Sanchez Productions is making a splash on the Internet, partnering with leading venture capital firm Sequoia Capital to launch comedy video site FunnyOrDie.com.

The site is simple enough in premise, and very Digg-like. Vote on the videos and decide whether they’re funny or whether they should die a fiery death. From Funny Or Die: The site was created by Gary Sanchez Productions and a bunch of Silicon Valley guys who drive Hondas and watch old episodes of Babylon Five. Venture capitalist, Mark Kvamme and his son came up with a concept for a new kind of comedy site and approached Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s company, Gary Sanchez Productions. Randy Adams, a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur, signed on to handle design and implementation. They along with writer/producer Chris Henchy sought to make a comedy site where established comedians and regular users could put up stuff just because they think it’s funny. At the same time they wanted to eliminate all the junk that people have to pick through to find funny stuff.

Sequoia Capital knows a thing or two about successful user-generated Web sites, having provided early rounds of funding to YouTube. The company also delivered venture capital for YouTube’s parent, Google, as well as Yahoo! PayPal, and Meebo.

While Gary Sanchez is no-where to be found, I managed to track down his Myspace page located here. Wherever he is, Gary manages to produce some pretty funny stuff. It’s fun to see what these comedians get up to in their spare time when they are not censored or their creativity hampered by old-media. Check out Will Ferrell’s short below.

FaceBook: All it takes is a little face time…

So, I joined Facebook a few weeks ago. I’m not usually one for the social networking sites, but I decided to see what all the fuss was about. I had only been to MySpace twice before, net amount of time spent on that site: 2.4 minutes. I figured if I’m really going to get into this Web 2.0 space, I should probably understand all that comes with User Generated Content or UGC sites. So on I go and two weeks later I have over 80 friends networked to my profile and I belong to several groups and networks of other like-minded people. The friends I have are actual people I’ve met in my “Real Life” (RL)- from acquaintances to great friends.

Part of the process of signing up is that Facebook suggests a scan of my email address book to first check and see if they are members of Facebook and to second, SPAM them a nice invite to join now that yours truly has graced the network with his presence. A few people I know trickle in that way, others find me via friend links from other people (you can only view the profiles and friend lists of people you authorize as your friends). And then an amazing thing happens: people start messaging me. I get “poked” (a low commitment action); I get posts on my public “wall” (a low-med commitment action); and I get private messages (a med commitment action). I say these interactions are amazing because these are almost all people who know my email address, they’ve been in my address book for years. All it would have taken anyone is a quick 30 seconds to bang out an email to me to reconnect.

Email is a high commitment action though, I guess- I’m just as guilty as next person for not keeping in better touch with everyone. I also find myself posting on friend’s walls and messaging folks myself. A year ago this month, Facebook was valued at half a billion dollars: $550 Million. At that time they had 7 million users. Today Facebook has over 18 million users, over half who log in every day! Valuations continue to climb and are now well into the speculative billions. 1,000,000,000’s – that’s a lot of dough for creating a place where people don’t have to feel email-level-commitment to keep in touch.

I’m looking forward to seeing where the Facebook community winds up. Social networking sites seem to be like popular nightclubs downtown- the hot destination today becomes yesterday’s news before you know it. I joined Facebook’s party in, what I’m guessing, is coming up on its peak. It’ll be interesting to see what the founder and investor’s exit strategy will be and how long they’ll hang on to this fickle gold-mine. They’ve already turned down $750 Million from Viacom and $1Bln from Yahoo. Not a bad exit for a 22 year old entrepreneur.

Some interesting Facebook facts, from their blog:

• Over half of their users log in daily.
• They’re now at 30 billion page views monthly.
• According to comScore, they are the 6th most trafficked US site, and account for 1% of all time spent on the internet.
• They have more than 1 billion photos on the site.
• To keep up with the huge amount of data that needs to be rapidly accessed at any given time, they utilize 2 Terabytes of RAM distributed across many Memcache servers.
• Their fleet of servers are hosted across two co-locations.
• Their search infrastructure fields 600 million searches each month using a 200-gigabyte search index, featuring real time updates.