Retweet – What does it mean and how important is it!

A Retweet allows Twitter users to share their favourite tweets with their own followers.
So if someone has 10,000 followers and they like one of your tweets and they retweet it, then it will go out to all of their followers, good eh!

It is done by copying and pasting the original tweet and sending it out. It’s usual to put “RT” plus the originator’s username at the beginning of the tweet. Here’s an example:

RT@thebizwoman: How to monetize your blog!

Obviously, if you regularly tweet great content then people will pick up on it and retweet you. They will also retweet you if your tweets are relevant to them or even, dare I say it, complementary.

A good way to get people to retweet you is to ask to be retweeted.
This works really well if your tweets are for a good cause or are likely to be helpful to your follower’s audience.

Here’s an example:

Entrepreneurs – learn how to monetize your blog PLEASE RETWEET ME!

This is only about 66 character; very important if you don’t want retweets with clipped off ends as you are only allowed a total of 140 characters in your tweets.

It is always better to simplify the procedure for your retweeter.
There is a great little application called PleaseRT.me – http://pleasert.me/
You add your tweet and it makes you keep it short then it adds a plea for a retweet at the end of your message, (I’m saying “message” because I’m fed up of saying “tweet”), which your follower can then click on to easily retweet without all the copy and pasting.
You can try it out now by retweeting this post.

Let’s face it if you don’t ask you don’t get!

Pat Sutton – Official Blog, http://www.patsutton.com