Promote Yourself: Get Retweeted

We’ve mentioned retweeting before — it’s a great way to increase your audience when other people send your tweet out to their followers. It’s the best possible outcome of a tweet. It’s a way to cast your net wider and gather in supporters, and it should be your goal on Twitter. As Web celeb Guy Kawasaki once put it, “You don’t know who the best evangelist will be for your product or service.” So you need to figure out how to get retweeted.

To manually retweet, copy the message and insert RT and the sender’s Twitter handle at the beginning. You can also retweet any post from the Twitter Website by mousing over it. When you mouse over a post, Twitter provides several possibilities below the message:

Figure 54 — How to Retweet Example

If you select Retweet, you see a message pop up (in what is known as a light box) similar to the following:

Figure 55 — Retweeting Example

If you select Retweet, Twitter will send the message, verbatim, without any commentary from you, to your followers. If you want to edit the message or add your own thoughts, stick to manually copying it to your status window and adding at the beginning the RT and user handle, or using the “via @whoever” convention to indicate you’ve edited or commented on the original tweet. Maddeningly  Twitter does not enable you to quote a tweet and add your commentary from the Website, but they do on some mobile versions.

To get others to retweet you, start off by answering the right question — not the original Twitter question: “What are you doing?” or its current incarnation, “What’s happening?” Instead, answer “What’s interesting?”

Guy Kawasaki is the master of finding interesting things to tweet about (with the help of his staff). My favorite — one that I retweeted almost immediately for no other reason than that it was really interesting — was “Taiwanese scientists bred glow-in-the-dark pigs.”[1] How can you resist?

So what interesting things should you tweet about? Try tweeting about Twitter. Twitter users love to read about:

• What some analyst thinks of Twitter
• How to use it better
• Lists of companies on Twitter
• Lists of CEOs on Twitter
• What’s wrong with Twitter?

You can also break news:

• Follow the Twitter newsbot of CNN (@cnnbrk), retweet its tweets, and get retweeted
• Find news from niche topics related to your product category
• If in doubt, tweet it. Most tweets are noise, so yours has as good a chance as any of standing out

Personal branding guru Dan Schwabel produced this list[2] of the most retweetable words and phrases:

While this list is probably accurate, we’re not sure how it actually helps! According to Dan’s list, the ultimate retweetable tweet could say “Would you please help retweet my great free new blog post about Top 10 Social Media People to Follow and Check Out?” Perhaps you should write that blog post, and include a link to it at the end of this sure-to-be-retweeted tweet?

Next up: How to Reply on Twitter