RT Means Retweeting

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When you hear something on Twitter that you’d like to repeat, you can ReTweet it.  Whether you’re using the Twitter.com web site or a Twitter client, you can usually see an RT or ReTweet button when you hold your mouse over a tweet.  Click that, and Twitter will resend the tweet from your own account, thereby passing it on to your followers.

This is most effective when someone who has a lot of followers retweets someone less popular.  If I’ve got 5,000 followers and @SQLRockstar only has 1,000, then I’ve effectively helped him reach 4,000 more people.  (The exact number can vary depending on how many of our followers overlap.)  This technique isn’t too effective if they have way more followers than me – for example, I might not want to bother retweeting something @Oprah said.  She’s pretty much covered the planet.  There’s always a chance I might get the message to a few new people, but come on.

When using Twitter’s built-in retweeting function, your followers will just see the retweet, but might not know who retweeted it or why.  If you find the tweet interesting enough to repeat, you might want to add your own two cents or opinion.  To fix that, you can mimic Twitter’s behavior yourself.  If I want to repeat something @DellServerGuy says, for example, the end result might look like this:

• @SQLAgentMan: “Lady Gaga is my guilty pleasure.”
• @BrentO: “Me too – I bought Fame Monster. RT @SQLAgentMan: Lady Gaga is my guilty pleasure.”

Here’s what just happened: @SQLAgentMan admitted to his followers (including me) that he has a penchant for fashionable pop stars.  I agreed, and I wanted to repeat the message to all of my followers too.

When replying to tweets like this, it’s important to recognize who said which part of the tweet.  Consider this tweet:

• @BrentO: “Good job opportunity. RT @SQLRockstar: I’m hiring a SQL Server DBA in the NYC area. Send me your resume.”

If you want to respond to the job posting, who should you talk to?  The correct answer is @SQLRockstar, because @BrentO was just repeating the message.

If you want your message to have the best chance of being repeated around the world, keep it as short as possible.  At the very bare minimum, leave enough space for “RT @YourName: “ – that’s the letters RT, a space, the @ symbol, your Twitter username, a colon, and then another space.  For me (@BrentO), that’s 12 characters, which means any tweets I really want retweeted should be 128 characters or less.  Ideally, they should be even shorter, because I want people to be able to add their own two cents in too.  You want your followers (and their followers) to be able to all contribute to the discussion.

As messages snowball and get repeated over and over again, they can turn into a namefest.  Tweets like this aren’t very valuable:

“RT @UserName4 @UserName3 @UserName2 @UserName1: There’s a 50% off sale at Amazon.com right now!”

If you start to run out of space or you just want to clean up usernames, consider only including the first username (the one who initially posted the message) and the last username (the one you heard it from.)  Leave out the other usernames in the middle if you want space for your own opinions.