Want To Get Re-Tweeted? Memorise Your Number (Reloaded)
Back in March I wrote an article that explained how you needed to ensure that you left a certain amount of characters at the end of your tweets if you wanted to seriously improve your chances of being retweeted.
This is the mathematics:
Your Number = length of username + five characters
To give yourself the best possible chance of a retweet, you need to make sure you leave this many characters free.
In the article I noted that my own number was 12. When sharing links and content, I always ensure I leave a minimum of 12 characters at the end of each and every tweet. This is a great habit to adopt. Otherwise, those wanting to retweet you are forced to edit your submissions so that they can give the proper credit. Because f this extra work, many times, they simply won’t bother retweeting you at all.
Worse, your prose can be severely impacted – personally, I hate it when somebody trims down my carefully-worded remark into something that (shudder) looks like text speak. Everybody who reads that now thinks that I write in text speak. The horror, the horror…
As said, I’m always very careful to leave the necessary 12 characters. Recently, however, I started to notice that despite this effort, a few were still editing my prose to fit it all in. At first, I couldn’t understand why they felt the need to do this – after all, I’d made every attempt to ensure that my update could be easily retweeted.
Then it suddenly hit me – they weren’t using Twitter’s more common RT. They were using via.
What’s quite tragic about all of this is I use via, too. That’s pretty much all I use. I like via because it places the emphasis on the content first, and credits the original poster second. Content is king, but it’s also important that credit is given where due.
But it’s not all roses, as via adds an extra couple of characters to each retweet. Typically, via is credited within parentheses, like this:
Because of those parentheses (and the space before the first), I (@Sheamus) actually need to leave a heady 15 characters of blank space in my updates to give myself the best possible chance of a retweet.
Jack Schofield, using the example above, needs to leave 21.
Hence, the mathematics has changed.
Your Number = length of username + eight characters
This is the absolute minimum amount of space you should always leave at the end of each and every tweet. Particularly if you’re sharing linked content or an important message.
That’s assuming, of course, you actually want the world to see it.
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I tend to use “via” if I’m linking to an article and want to credit the original web site (or give people an idea of where that link’s going to take them), assuming I don’t work it into the actual Tweet.
If I’m retweeting someone’s tweet, then I’ll use the more common “RT” method.
Admittedly I didn’t plan that strategy, but that’s the way it seems to have worked out.
Web article headlines tend to be naturally shorter than tweets, so you typically have more room to add the “via”. Twitter users, on the other hand, tend to go right up to the line, so more often than not you have no choice but to use the “RT” method.
Besides, I find it easier to just hit the retweet button in Tweetdeck and have it automatically do all the formatting. Other apps may differ, but to use the “via” method for retweets I’d have to edit the tweet every time.
Likewise, in bit.ly it automatically puts the text insertion cursor at the end of the tweet, so it’s pretty easy to just hammer in “(via wherever)” and then tweak the rest of the tweet if needed.
At the end of the day I don’t think it matters which way round people do things. It’s always obvious in context if you’re retweeting someone or posting a link, regardless of which method you use. I think my division of retweets=RT and links=via simply came about because they were the fastest ways to do it in TweetDeck and bit.ly respectively.
.-= Mark´s last blog ..Retro vs Modern (MSNBC Lays Down the Smack II: Smack Harder) =-.
Seesmic Desktop allows you to decide how you want retweets to be presented (giving you four options, I believe), so via for me is automated. There’s no editing involved. It’s great!