Twitter is in the process of adding an official ‘retweet’ option to its service.
It’s very early days yet - most people haven’t received the option, including some in the 33 office - but it’s already created a lot of debate (TechCrunch and PC Mag for example) because it’s fundamentally different from the organic way that the community has popularised retweets
How-to retweet (before and after)
Originally, a manual retweet or one by a Twitter client, will copy the whole tweet and add the phrase “RT @name” at the beginning of the tweet*. They also let you add commentary to the tweet if you’d like to add your own perspective.
The new approach won’t let you edit a Tweet. Instead, the whole message will be pushed verbatim into your follower’s stream.
The original approach won’t be outlawed but is likely to shrink or disappear as more clients adopt the new feature.
Why is retweet being changed?
There are many reasons that Ev Williams explains on his blog but here are a couple:
1. To reduce noise, you’ll only ever see a retweeted message once. This will keep your stream a little quieter, but sounds like it will have a negative impact on the way we currently gauge the importance of a message that is popular and being retweeted. Noise can be distracting but in case of breaking events, it can also be an important sign to take notice.
2. You’ll be able to hide retweets from people. For example, if I only wanted to see Dom’s personally authored tweets then I could hide his retweets.
Our initial reaction…
- Twitter is taking more control of what it wants you to see. Twitter was previously a river of news, but its content is now more personalised and curated, by the user but also by decisions Twitter makes on our behalf. Over the last few years, people have built up great followings based on community-sourced best practices. This will fundamentally change how people use Twitter successfully.
- Campaigns by businesses will have to work harder to generate the same noise as before. This is a move to reduce spam abuse of the service but will have a big affect on campaigns that rely on retweets, such as the recent #beatcancer campaign. A passionate following and an appeal to “RT pls” would often get your message in front of the right people, this is going to change and change fast.
As a footnote, Ben pointed out that this is an ever-changing time for brands and social networks. Facebook has recently changed the way brands can run competitions on the site. You’ll need Facebook to approval competitions on their fan pages, and then only if the competition is developed using a Facebook approved third-party widget.
We’re not the only people talking about the changes but I’d love to hear your comments about this post.
Phil
* some apps replace RT with ‘via’ or place the message at the end
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Good overview Phil and I generally agree with your conclusions. It’ll be interesting to see how quickly this is adopted and also how soon the old habits die out.
I think brands have become a bit lazy when it comes to RTs and so this could be a positive move.
However, I for one haven’t really noticed a problem with the number of retweets in my stream and my concern is that Twitter is perhaps trying to define ‘how’ we use the service a bit too much. I’ve always really liked the fact that Twitter is a relatively open platform that doesn’t try to *impose* functionality on its users unlike other networks (e.g. Facebook).
By Danny Whatmough on Nov 11, 2009
I think the theory of the changes will make Twitter streams clearer and more manageable for the majority of users, which is a good thing.
I also agree that it means brands will need to work harder to make their message heard - I hope this meas that instead of generic RTs, brands will now be expected to put more consideration into who they are contacting, and why, making the experience for users more personal.
What I hope brands avoid doing however is spamming users they identify as ‘key people to contact’ - if they do no dout they will be swiftly blocked - as this will culminate in even more noise.
As ever with social media, I think the approach that will need to be adopted is ‘a little and not so often, with the right people’.
By matt churchill on Nov 11, 2009