The Power of the ReTweet on Twitter

A few weeks ago, I conducted a workshop for NYC Webgrrls on How to use Twitter for Business.  The room was packed, the learning was fast paced, and we were able to cover a lot of Twitter ground.

One of the topics that we talked about is the Power of the ReTweet, which is a way of republishing someone else’s tweet to your users.  ReTweeted posts are generally indicated by adding ‘RT @username’ in front of the original tweet. Although as seen in the example below, there is no hard rule…as long as you give the attribution to the author of the Tweet.

The Re-tweet is the viral marketing component of Twitter.  I used the following slide to illustrate the point (click on image below for larger view):

My post “Reading: PC Mag’s Top 100 Web Sites of 2009 http://bit.ly/GgoF8″ was posted on Twitter to my 2077 followers, which got ReTweeted by 4 other people, potentially reaching 19,973 people!

Here are some tips on how to get ReTweeted (RT)

• Publish Engaging & Interesting content so it can spark discussions & get ReTweeted
• Make sure to leave at least 20 characters free so people can just ReTweet you without doing additional work.  This will increase your ReTweet probability.
• Use words and phrases that will get you the most ReTweets
• Ask to be ReTweeted: include “please ReTweet” or “please RT” in your Twitter post.  I generally don’t do this but have seen it work for other people.