A Retweet (RT) is a Twitter post originally made by one user that is forwarded by another user. Retweets are useful for propagating interesting posts and links within the Twitter community (although you can also say outside the Twitter community via real time social search from Google and now Bing). Retweeting provides an enormous potential for viral marketing. Numerous studies suggest the average Twitter user retweets only one in 300-400 URL’s. One can measure how much influence user (person A) has one user (person B) by counting the number of times B retweeted A. Getting retweet is important on a few different levels:
- People are actually reading your tweets and think that some of them are actually valuable enough to retweet to their followers.
- The act of someone retweeting your tweet generates traffic back to your profile or the URL you listed. This can be valuable traffic generator if your URL is pointing back to a webpage that sells products or services (think branding). When you get a retweet, the potential of reaching larger audiences suddenly opens up for your business. Basically, the amplify effect of retweets, has the potential to make your business content posts go viral on Twitter.
- People want to be retweeted! Having retweets and other interaction in your tweet stream makes you a much more attractive person/entity to follow than someone whose tweets one-way.
- RT’s will get you more #FollowFriday recommendations. No brainer here, if you’re on a #FollowFriday recommendation, your Twitter followers will grow thus wielding more influence.
- Retweets help build trust. Period. If you retweet valuable posts, your followers will trust you more than ever. But be careful, At the same time, ineffective retweeting can wreck your personal brand reputation.
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