You see it on every site, including this one. Share icons after every post. These icons are taking over the conventional comment sections. I still think comments are the best form of feedback, but in this world of “instant gratification”, I prefer retweets on Twitter.
On Twitter, if you read an article and retweet it to your community it shows the following:
- You took the time to acknowledge someone’s post or link and
- You thought it was good information to share with others or you have opinion regarding the post.
- Sometimes the comments with the retweet can actually help sell your ideas to your community.
- It puts the focus on good content that is valuable to people.
These type of communications on Twitter, travel far and fast and soon many posts have gone viral in a matter of hours.
Compare this activity to other activities on social media platforms:
Likes – For family purposes, it can be a contest to see how many likes a person can get and there are some good comments from time to time. On company pages, is a company better or worse based on the number of likes they receive. Does it really matter?
Plusses – Pluses are nice if followed by comments, and it appears there is some weight to a “+”, but it is pretty fuzzy as to what that weight is.
Check-ins – If I go on Google Places or Foursqure and I check-in at a particular place, I might receive some type of discounted offering. From a marketing standpoint, should I base my work on the number of people who check-in? I might see who the mayor is, but I can’t read too much into it.
Again, Retweets are really the most powerful form of feedback on social media. It is a great way to get instant feedback from your readers and grow your community at the same time. I really believe this is the reason why Twitter remains a vital player in the social media world. In addition, your tweet or retweet can be viewed by a larger audience. Remember, you have to be friends on Facebook in order to see posts. Google Plus is open to the public, but the jury is out as to the type of people who are using it regularly. On Foursquare, you also need to be a friend of someone to see their posts, unless that person decides to share it on other platforms.
This leads to this last point, a number of people share their tweets and retweets across platforms. I don’t think this is such a good option and often it can look very spammy, especially if you follow that same person and see the same, exact post on every site.
Use Twitter to gauge how well you are doing with respect to engaging your followers and promoting content worth reading. I think it is the best platform available to gain respect and more retweets as you begin to write and produce content that people are interested in.