Jay Leonard
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.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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I have to agree with you that retweets are powerful because it’s a simple affirmation that someone believes in what you tweet.. and it has the power to get amplified in his/her network of followers. It’s a chain reaction of retweets then.. and I sometimes experience this when I participate in this weekly twitter chat on customer service. When it comes to comments, compliments is a plus, but you don’t learn from it as well. I would love to read more than the ‘thank you, great post’ stuff you see so often and even have someone spar with me on what I’ve written.
Shaleen
I think your comments are right on. Commenting has become so superficial and hopefully it will be better in the future.
Some great thoughts here! Thanks for sharing.
Brent
While Google has been touting the search engine results potential with Google+, it still looks like Twitter is playing a big role in search results. Several tests performed recently have mentioned that around 7500+ tweets may be enough to rank a page on the first page in Google. Whether this is accurate, I guess, it depends on what that search keyword is.
Paul
Your comments are right on with respect to my name. I would be careful in putting too much weight in any area at this time with respect to Google and Google+.
Google continues to make changes and all of us need to look for clues to maximize our content through Google indexing and search placement.
Something to think about!
Thanks for sharing!
Brent
Hi Brent – I understand exactly what you are saying, but to play devil’s advocate – to me it takes no more effort to retweet something than it does to +1. They’re both just a mouseclick away. What I do think is more valuable is when someone retweets your Tweet, and they add a little message of validation along with it. That to me is more valuable than just a retweet or +1.