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Making your Tweets “Re-Tweetable”

twitter1For those of you who don’t yet use Twitter, having one of your tweets “re-tweeted” is a good thing. It means that someone read your message – or thought or opinion or question – and thought it was interesting enough or compelling enough or funny enough or whatever enough to pass along to others.

When your tweet is re-tweeted, your tweet is then heard (potentially) by a whole new set of followers. Some may take action on your original tweet – clicking a link or writing an @reply/@mention to you. Others may choose to begin following you, in hopes that you continue to provide valuable insight and commentary.

In any event, re-tweeting is generally a good thing. Mashable had a good article the other day about writing a “retweetable tweet”. That article boiled it down to five basic tips (I’m paraphrasing here, so click the link above for Mashable’s full text).

1. Include a link in your tweet – Twitter limits your message to 140 characters. A link provides the reader somewhere to go for the more complete thought or message.

2. Don’t use all 140 characters – When someone retweets, the original author’s username is attached (i.e., RT @k2mediakc Make your Tweets “Re-Tweetable”  bit.ly/link). If a tweet runs up to 140 characters, the retweeter will be forced to edit and abbreviate portions of the original tweet. It’s a pain in the butt. Make it easy, keep it short.

3.  When Retweeting, Add Something Original – Even when you retweet someone, you can contribute to the greater conversation. Edit the original tweet a bit to allow for room to make a very short comment. I usually put mine in brackets at the end; others use different methods. Even something like {This is SO cool!} works to make the RT a bit more engaging.

4. Build Credibility with Your Bio and URL – You’ll probably need to convince some people that you’re worthy of being retweeted. Spend some time on your Twitter bio and link it to an URL that is meaningful to your business/social media purpose.

5. Combine Personal with Professional – People love “getting to know you”. Let them know there is a real person behind that TweetDeck dashboard or iPhone. Every once in a while, pull back the curtain a bit and tweet something less-business and more-personal. You might find that you finally get the human interaction you were looking for.

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