The Power of a Retweet: How Twitter Can Take Your Content Viral
Today’s guest post comes from Lianne Froggatt, Digital Communications Manager for Ideasbynet.
Twitter: an increasingly powerful online medium that can do wonders for your business. Since its start in 2006, Twitter has been constantly growing and evolving, with more people joining every day.
Retweeting – the act of reposting another person’s status update – is a popular Twitter feature, but one that’s often underutilized by small business owners and solo entrepreneurs marketing themselves via social media.
How can you utilize this medium to stimulate conversation and drive more traffic to your site? First, let’s explore the benefits of retweeting other people’s content.
The Benefits of Retweeting Other People’s Content
Engaging with other users is key when developing a social media profile. Looking to engage with influential people in your niche or potential customers for your company? Retweeting them is a brilliant way to develop that initial contact.
Retweeting indicates that you deem what they have to say important or interesting enough to share with your own followers. It also shows that you are engaging with what they saying. They may therefore be more inclined to engage with you in return.
Retweeting useful or interesting information to your followers will also create a greater interest in your profile. Rather than your profile simply being a tool for self promotion, it will be an interesting and useful source of information for your followers, encouraging greater interaction and involvement with your potential customers or clients.
Now that we’ve explored how retweeting other people’s updates can improve your social media marketing, let’s look at two key benefits of having your own content retweeted.
The Benefits of Being Retweeted
The most obvious and important benefit to being retweeted is the promotion of your Twitter account (and by default your website). If your content is deemed interesting or important enough to be retweeted then you will be seen to be influential and knowledgeable. Your content will also be seen by a much wider audience of potential customers.
Your followers are not only giving you promotion but they are in effect endorsing your company to their own followers and associating themselves with you. Personal recommendations are extremely powerful social proof when deciding on products or services and a retweet can be a wide-reaching and important recommendation.
Unleash the Power of a Retweet!
So, how to harness the power of this medium? Retweeting other people’s content is a good start. Just make sure that you retweet information that is useful, important or interesting for your followers. Encouraging retweets of your own content is a little trickier. Here are a few tips to help encourage retweets of your content.
1. Run competitions. When someone retweets your content they will be entered into a contest, this method is all over twitter and definitely increases engagement with your profile.
2. Make sure what you say is interesting! Simple I know, but you won’t achieve retweets if you have nothing of interest to say!
3. Include interesting links. This will give extra benefit to anyone that retweets you; they are sharing more information than just your 140 characters.
4. Tweet your most interesting content between 3 and 6 p.m., when statistics show that people are most likely to retweet your content.
What content are you most likely to retweet? How have you convinced others to retweet your own content? Let me know in the comments section below.
8 Responses to The Power of a Retweet: How Twitter Can Take Your Content Viral
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Good advice and timely for me as I am embarking on a more proactive and regimented retweeting campaign today to see how it works for me (I’m confident it will). One thing that I do is ALWAYS thanks someone if they retweet or mention me. And I am a bit shocked at how few people do this.
Thanks!
Geoff Vincent recently posted…Helicopter parents enabled by employers? Improbable, but true.
Great advice, Kelly! I’ve always been curious what times are the best to tweet something to have it shared. I’ll be adjusting my times now for between 3-6 PM
Thank you!
amy swanson recently posted…The Martha Stewart Guide to Entrepreneurship and Making a Comeback
Me too, Geoff! I admit, I forget to thank people at times, but I also think it goes a long way toward building a passionate community of followers.
Thanks, Amy. I haven’t gone so far as to schedule my own tweets, but if you use a scheduling tool like HootSuite or CoTweet, it’s easy to take advantage of peak traffic times
Kelly,
I love to retweet other people’s tweets. It is easy, effective and fun. Most people will thank you for the action if you leave their name in the tweet. I always try to thank those who share and retweet my stuff.
~Allie
Allie recently posted…Blogging Success: Failure Is Success
I recently found an interesting service that is surprisingly spam free that allows you to get a lot more RT of whatever you choose – justretweet, check it out, sorry, not providing link to avoid this comment being misunderstood but google it. Very simple to use and so far we have seen great results from it.
Alex Sysoef recently posted…Create Optimized Google Places For Business And Local SEO Ranking
Hi Guys, really glad you enjoyed the post. I love retweeting people and I agree with you Geoff that it is really important to thank people when they take the time to retweet you. A good service that we use when retweeting is Tweetdeck; on here you can quote Tweets as well as simply retweeting so you can include your own comment or question as well.
Hope this is helpful!
Recently, it was brought to my attention that to retweet is to endorse the person/company that the tweet originated from opposed to simply providing information that your followers may find useful and interesting. I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.