Learning How To Retweet For Your Enterprise

By Rich Brooks
Expert Author
Article Date: 2009-10-08

Dear Rich, I <3 Twitter, but I still don't understand the retweet. Do you just hit the "reply arrow" next to the person's tweet and then hit capital RT and then type your tweet? -- Troubled in Twitterland

Dear Troubled,

What you're describing is a reply. When you're at Twitter.com and rollover someone's tweet, you'll see the arrow. By clicking on that icon you'll be replying to that person, not retweeting them. (Retweeting, or RT, is repeating what they said while giving them credit.)

Other 3rd party apps, like TweetDeck, have a similar method of replying to someone, using that curved arrow:

Twitter.com doesn't have a default retweet feature, but the most widely accepted RT format is "RT @twitterhandle:" and then their tweet. Another option is just appending (via @twitterhandle) to the end of their tweet; however, it adds 7 characters to the RT as opposed to 4 characters in the first example.

If you're using TweetDeck, rollover your tweep's avatar and choose the RT arrow, which is the non-curved one:

If you're looking to get your own tweets retweeted, it's helpful to know your "magic number", or the number of characters someone will use to retweet you subtracted from 140. So, if "RT @therichbrooks: " (don't forget the spaces) takes up 19 characters, my original tweet needs to be 121 characters or less.

Another tip might be to read that post at @Mashable in the tweet above: http://bit.ly/3bRjOX

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About the Author:
Rich Brooks is president of flyte new media, a Web site design and Internet marketing company in Portland, Maine. Flyte works with small businesses to build professional Web sites that often include e-commerce, Flash and content management systems. They promote their clients' sites through search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, business blogs and social media. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/therichbrooks.