Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Be Careful what you re-Tweet


For those that do not know what RT means:
RT = Re-Tweet.
And it is a nice thing to do when you see a tweet come through your network that you love and/or appreciate. You can copy the words and put RT in front of their name and re-tweet it!

For example, if someone sent out a tweet reading:
A gal I follow:

ModelSupplies

Just tweeted: @ModelSupplies You can go a month without food, you can live three days without water, but you can't go more then sixty seconds without HOPE. -Sean Swarner

I like what she posted so I would copy what she posted: You can go a month without food, you can live three days without water, but you can't go more then sixty seconds without HOPE. -Sean Swarner

And then I would click on the ARROW to reply to her, then I would paste what she said after her name. So it would now look like this:

@ModelSupplies
You can go a month without food, you can live three days without water, but you can't go more then sixty seconds without HOPE. -Sean Swarner

THEN I would add RT in front of the @ Before her name. The KEY to this is to make sure you have a SPACE or her name will not be a HOT LINK. So, it would now read:

RT @ModelSupplies You can go a month without food, you can live three days without water, but you can't go more then sixty seconds without HOPE. -Sean Swarner

NOW, we have a problem with this tweet.

When I re-Tweet it she has a long name so, it has put it over the 140 limit by 12. Twitter alert is telling me -12.

I have a few options, I can try to shorten it to something like this:


RT @ModelSupplies Ucan go a month without food U can live three days without water but Ucan't go more then 60 sec without HOPE -Sean Swarner

The saying now fits with 0 space left! Notice I changed the word YOU to U and I removed commas, changed sixty to 60 and shortened seconds.
The only bad thing about this is it will be difficult for someone else to RT it.


Keep this in mind when you are sending out short sayings. Keep them as short as possible so that your friends can RT them easily. Keep a space before the @ AND at the end add a period and/or an additional space. Especially when you RT links.
Make double sure there is a SPACE after the link or it will not be HOT.


I hope that helps understand a bit better about Re-tweeting!


Something else I must tell you about,
today I had re-tweeted a nasty radio show and I felt terrible after I did it.

One of my friends tweeted about a current Radio show that was on the air at Blog Talk Radio so, nice person that I am decided to help them out with the promotion and RT a few of their posts. Suddenly I decided to tune into one of those shows and soon found out it contained nasty, vulgar wording in the music!

I felt so bad that I had actually sent that tweet out to my followers.

How very stupid of me!

GREAT LESSON LEARNED.

Beware of what you RT.

Good rule of thumb is to check out the link before you re-tweet it because it will indeed reflect onto you and the results will be followers lost.


My sincerest apology to all those that may of heard that show.
I will pay more attention to what I re-tweet in the future.

Much respect,
Danna Crawford
CEO/Founder PowerSellingMom, Inc.