NOWSOURCING

Brian I think you make some solid arguments, the problem is a lot of people prefer the retweet format. I remember having a discussion with a few people about this previously and they really didn’t like the (via @yournamehere) business. I try and mix it up a bit using both the typical retweet and the personal comment if I feel it is a stellar post. Sometimes I just want to share because it’s newsworthy, not because I think it’s a great piece. Perhaps that’s how I differ in how I share posts.

It’s in my opinion that since Twitter has officially adopted the retweet that they should discount those characters from the total message so that your 140 characters begin after the RT: @username, but that’s just me. Good post though, unfortunately the 140 character limit is often a blessing and a curse.

Brian,

Thank you for the shout out! Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised to see my tweet when I read your post this morning.

Being a marketing guy (and being accused, upon occasion, of having an opinion or two), it is hard for me to understand why anyone would NOT want to post their retweets with their own two cents. If a tweet is valuable, newsworthy, or just plain weird enough to share with your audience, doesn’t it also merit sharing your own thoughts on it?

I realize not everyone loves to write, but I have to respectfully disagree with Mike and Residuetiger (do you prefer “Residue” or “Tiger” for short?) on Twitter’s 140-character limit being a bad thing. Whether it’s a deadline, a budget, or a word/character limit, good writing benefits from constraint. Yes, I run over the 140-character limit on what I first type out, but what I end up with [when I have to "get to the point" in under 140 characters AND allow enough space to make it easy for others to retweet my retweet] is almost always better than what I first wrote.

Regards,

-K

Ken Herron
Chief Marketing Officer | Co-Founder
SocialGrow Inc.
+1 888 SOC GROW, x2 Voice/Fax
ken.herron@socialgrow.com
http://socialgrow.com
http://twitter.com/socialgrow

Brian, you make a great point here. I do believe there is Twitter laziness (myself included) where they may not even open the link, but just plain RT the article because it has a compelling title. It starts to wear on the content provided from an integrity standpoint – especially for those bloggers that put their heart and soul into writing not only a catchy title, but rich, enticing, and great content that should be shared properly.

I’d like to make a stance to make sure I actually read through an article before I RT it. Maybe we all can stand to get a little bit smarter and less lazy.

Thanks for the post!
Allison

I think it’s important to understand how retweeting works, and how it can improve your twitter performance.

The most important point to take away is the amount of space to leave in a tweet, for maximum retweetability. If you make a tweet to long it’s not able to be retweeted easily, unless someone finds it interesting enough to tweak it a little.

Thanks for sharing! =)

I totally agree with you! I get so tired of people posting links to so many different places – many times I feel overloaded with them. But if someone tells me why they recommend a specific link, I’m that much more likely to click it.

Thanks, I never really thought about that! It’s such a small thing, but yeah, I can totally see how it makes a different impression.