Twitter 2018 – Retweet Strategy

Twitter 2018 – Retweet strategy to improve your experience

Twitter 2018 – Retweet strategy

You see a tweet you like. You want to share it with others on the platform. Twitter 2018 offers you three options via their website or app:

• Basic Retweet
• Retweet with Comment
• Using a different account to retweet

Retweet

The most common approach. Twitter shares the message, through your account. Your followers see the message. The app flags the tweet as shared by you. The app displays the tweet as coming from the original owner. You move on to the next thing. So, if your strategy is to curate tweets on, say, a particular subject, this is the simplest method.

Curating tweets via a retweet stream presents followers with your message. That message lacks your branding. While that approach gives followers a “clean” presentation in Twitter 2018, it doesn’t really remind them who brings them the information. That’s okay for internal or private information streams. The followers know the curation source.

Retweet with Comment

This method adds your remarks to the original tweet. It extends the basic retweet but does not modify the original. The message creator maintains their “brand” or “ownership”. This method allows you to add value to the tweet. Followers see the origin clearly. For example, you read something from a national/international news outlet. Adding a local take better informs your followers. So, you annotate the tweet with your comment.

Twitter 2018 has a massive user base. Its size makes it difficult for retweets, even with comments, to get the attention of popular reporters and writers. Therefore, retweet with comment is not worth the effort. Focus the effort on informing followers.

Retweet with comment from a different account

The twitter app enables you to set up multiple accounts. Occasionally, you may encounter a tweet on one account that would be more appropriate to share from one of the others. This happens to me regularly, since I’ve got such split personalities on Twitter. I encounter a politically-charged tweet on my history account, @NOLAHistoryGuy. Rather than retweeting from there, I’ll tap the account’s avatar. Choosing my @YatPundit account sends the retweet to a better audience. Same with social media-related tweets. I change the account to @YatMedia, then share.

Going a step further

There’s one more possibility for retweeting: The “quote”. Quoting a tweet is an old option. Twitter 2018 no longer offers it on the website or the app. It is available through their API. So, you can share a tweet as a link, as if you copied and pasted a news story from the web into Twitter.

This wreaks havoc with Twitter’s tracking and metrics. A quoted tweet appears in Twitter as your original content. I use quotes regularly. I avoid quotes when I want the original tweeter to “get credit” for the post.

Quoting requires an app other than Twitter’s. I prefer Hootsuite. If you’d like to talk about Hootsuite or other Twitter strategies, stop by during Office Hours. We’ll chat.