Retweet Power

Unless you have been living under a stone for the past year you should need no introduction to the internet phenomenon that is Twitter (if you do please click here). As well as its original remit of letting the world know ‘what you are doing’ Twitter can be a great marketing tool for your online business if used correctly and responsibly. Retweets or RTs as they are known are when someone takes one of your Tweets and broadcasts it to all of their own followers. The power and potential of RTs should not be underestimated and getting people with a huge following themselves to RT your content can have a massive impact on your own reader numbers. The larger the number of followers a person has, the more likely someone amongst them will RT your Tweet again, so on and so forth until hopefully your content goes truly viral amongst Twitters vast network.

In this short article I shall try and show you how to maximise the potential of RTs and encourage others to RT your own content.

Supply quality content

It might seem a bit of a no-brainer this one, but if your content isn’t of a good enough quality no-one will RT it. When you RT you are putting your reputation behind someone elses work, no-one is going to RT something that is rubbish. If it is a great quality article it will sell itself and will be something that others will want to share within their Twitter network.

Be interactive

Keep people interested in Retweeting your content by offering an incentive. Many top sites have offered a chance to win a prize in return for the RT of a particular message. You can also make it easy for people to tweet straight from your blog or website by including some extra Twitter code in the link as follows:

http://twitter.com/?status=

Clicking that particular link will open the Twitter homepage with the “What are you doing?” field prefilled with whatever you put after the equals(=) symbol. Please remember to use %20 instead of any spaces:

i.e. http://twitter.com/?status=my%20message

If you are not willing or able to mess with code there are several plugins that will automatically place buttons that allow visitors to tweet your content.

Increase your following

It follows that the more you tweet and the more followers you have, the bigger the audience and the greater the chance of you getting a RT. If you want more followers try using a course such as Twitter Rocket which is a 5 day plan which if used correctly could increase your followers by as much as 1000 per week. Click here for more details.

Build a rapport

By talking to fellow bloggers and others that are experts in your field you have a greater chance of forming mutual RT ‘partnerships’ whereby you agree to RT each others content. You could go further and build an RT ‘syndicate’ whereby a whole group of you agree to RT each others content a certain amount of times per week. These can be very efficient ways of spreading your knowledge especially if all the members of your syndicate are experts in the same or similar fields.

Always tweet your latest blog post

Make sure you tweet each and every addition to your blog. The simple truth is that if it hasnt been tweeted it can’t be retweeted so by following this simple rule you are pressing the start button on the whole process. I use a plugin called Twitter Tools which automatically tweets each post I write as they are published.