The retweeting etiquette is vital to know if you want your content to spread on Twitter. If you don’t want your content to spread on Twitter, what are you doing there?

Twitter, the micro-blog site that made a big splash in the internet community over the last year and a half, is much like any other social media site in that it is its own little world. The ways in which a business can interact with users are both quite restricted and at the same time strangely free. You can talk to our consultants at SEO Consult about the pros and cons of social media campaigns.

Retweeting, which is the term for forwarding a post on to other users, is a significant boon for search engine optimisation. A retweet is a post, usually taken in its entirety, which is picked up by a particular user and re-posted. Once re-posted, it reaches that user’s entire network, most of whom will not have seen the original post. Studies have shown that once a piece is retweeted, it has a higher chance of being retweeted again, meaning that well-written ‘retweet bait’ could travel far.

Know your etiquette for RT

The etiquette on Twitter is different to that on any other site. The forms of communication on Twitter play such a big part in its operation that it is vital to study up before you participate. The etiquette for retweets is particularly important for any business using Twitter as part of a social media marketing campaign.

The format of retweets propagated by TweetDeck has become the standard format. This puts the original material at the start of the message, and allows for the forwarding user to comment if they want to. The format looks like: RT @originaluser: Original content [forwarding user's content]. The RT stands for retweet, and some users still use ‘retweet’.

Retweets don’t work like forwarding an email. Rather, it is a system that was developed to give proper credit to the original writer, and to let other users know that it is a forwarded message. This means that it’s likely that your post will be sent forward as a whole, with your name on it.

Remember the basics

One thing that is vital to retweets that has nothing to do with etiquette is length of message. Twitter posts have 140 characters, regardless of whether they’ve been retweeted or not. This is not a lot of room. If you want your post retweeted, your original post has to allow room for users to add their own information if they wish.

More good news

Not only does Twitter etiquette dictate that retweets are credited and whole, any call to action should be forwarded as well. This means that the ‘please RT’ you put in that convinced one user to pass the message on has a chance to work again. Etiquette dictates that whole links are left in and tags are left whole. This means your well-crafted message will go further.

Using Twitter is not a panacea, nor is it appropriate for every online business. However, Twitter provides a sphere of exciting possibilities.

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