ReTweet Etiquette

We all know retweets (RTs) are vital for spreading your message on Twitter. But there are rules of engagement or etiquette which many are unaware of. Do bear in mind that retweeting has its own etiquette or way in which things should be handled.  Observe these rules and see if you get more of an audience.

 

Golden RT Etiquette

• Always thank those who retweet you, give credit.
• Be reciprocal.  Always retweet a tweet from the tweeb who retweeted you. 
• Do not retweet your retweeted tweets.
• Do not retweet someone who is complimenting you, if you can resist.

 

 

How To Get Retweeted In The First Place

• Provide valuable content to your followers.
• Dont make it about yourself.
• Promote others and their conversations.
• Ask for retweets.  "Please Retweet" not "Pls RT".
• Add a link to your tweet.
• Use hashtags, one is OK, two are better. 
• The best day for getting retweets is Friday, this drops off sharply during the weekend and rises during the week days.
• The ideal time for retweets is noon to two o'clock in whatever time zone the majority of your audience are found in.

 

 

The idea for this post as kindly suggested by Rebecca @scarberryfields.  If you have an idea for a post that you would like to see or if you have a query just write a comment below.

Regards, Chris

  

How To Get More Retweets - Infographic

 

Measure Your Twitter Engagement

I use social media to drive traffic and Twitter is an important part of that strategy.  What I have noticed is that even when a blog post starts to age and loose traffic you can still get a spike of page views.  These spikes of traffic are brought about by retweets, of that I am certain.  So I asked myself how can I monitor and record how many retweets I get and what do I need to do to get more retweets.




My favourite Twitter tool is Commun.it.  In addition to suggesting who to follow and who to unfollow, it has great Twitter stats.

Above we have a month on month report of Twitter activity.  I do check to see that the number of retweets that I receive are increasing.  I would put this down to a combination of tweeting the right content which makes the right connection with the right people.  Its about engaging with someone as passionate about your subject matter as you are.  Commun.it also calculates your reach which is the total number of people who could potentially see your retweets or mentions.  Naturally you like to see this figure go up, unlike the example above for some reason.

Klout, PerrIndex, Kred, TweetLevel and PeekAnalytics all measure influence.  But influence is a direct result of engagement.  What I like what about Klout is you can go to the page of someone with a higher Klout score and see what type of content gives a higher level of retweets.  I need to point out that there is a lot to be learnt from this.
For the cusious amongst you, tools that measure the influence of your content include mPACT Pro, TRAACKR and Appinions.

Additional Twitter engagement tools include:
Topsy http://analytics.topsy.com/  This gives the number of hits to your website/blog from Twitter.  I confess I wonder how accurate this is.
TwitterCounter http://twittercounter.com/  This shows the growth in your followers and following.  It predicts the number of followers you will have in 15 days but it does not measure engagement.
BufferApp http://bufferapp.com   Allows you to schedule tweets and gives stats on your tweets such as number of times retweeted, how often favoured and reach.

Experiment with these tools and establish a favourite to keep a check on your Twitter engagement.
Do let other how you handle engagement!  Chris