Maria's Guides

Sure, it’s easy to retweet someone else’s tweet. But are you overdoing it?

I’ve been on twitter for more than three years now and have sent more than 22,000 tweets into the Twitterverse. These are a mix of the usual inane comments, bits of wisdom, meal reports, witty remarks (or my attempts at witty remarks), links to interesting content, and retweets of other people’s tweets.

It’s the retweeting habit of Twitter users that I want to address here.

A retweet, in case you’re not familiar with the term, is a tweet that someone else wrote that is echoed to the Twitterverse. Retweets come in two flavors:

• Old-style retweets include the letters RT or via followed by the originator’s Twitter name. For example:
  
  or
  
• Official Twitter retweets appear to come from the originator, but they were retweeted by someone you follow. Thus, they wind up in your timeline from the account of the originator, even if you don’t follow that person. Here’s an example:
  

I could go into a lecture on which method is better (official retweet, in case you’re wondering), but I’ll save that for another post. Right now, I’m more concerned with how much people retweet and what they are retweeting.

This is where I get into some hot water with some Twitter friends. You see, what prompted this post was the complete retweet abuse I’m seeing on Twitter among a handful of people I follow. I don’t mean to point fingers, so I won’t mention any Twitter names. But if you’re one of the people repeatedly committing one of the following abuses, you know who you are.

• Retweeting more than you tweet. If you consistently retweet other people’s content more than you create your own original tweets, take a moment to consider why you are on Twitter. Is it your purpose to simply echo the words and links of the people you follow? There are Twitter bots that can do that automatically and they’re only slightly more annoying. Why should anyone follow you if nearly everything you tweet has its source elsewhere? (And if the rest of your tweets are from Foursquare, do yourself a favor and just drop out of Twitter now, before someone has to kill you.)
• Retweeting content that just isn’t interesting to the majority of your followers — or many people on the planet. You may think the latest Latin language release of the Open Source project, thingamabobwhatchamacallit widget plugin, is the most fascinating thing on the planet. But do you really think your followers agree? And if they did, don’t you think they’d be actively following the same sources of information about that project that you are? Retweeting stuff that few people care about only raises the noise to signal ratio on Twitter. And who likes noise? A corollary to this is retweeting local area content when you have only a few local followers. Your 724 non-local followers don’t really care that the corner antique clothing store is having a big sale on Tuesday. Or that your next door neighbor’s cat has gone missing. Or that there’s a fire/flood/tornado/locust warning for your county. If we wanted local area information on Twitter, we’d follow the same kinds of local information sources you follow — but for our areas.
• Retweeting other people’s references to your Twitter account. Okay, so @yourbiggestfan tickled your fancy by tweeting about how much he liked your latest book/blog post/tweet/haircut. Do you know how dorky and self-centered you look by retweeting his gushy tweet? Isn’t Twitter narcissistic enough by giving you an opportunity to brag about yourself? Do you really think it’s necessary to retweet the nice things other people say about you, too? Ick.
• Retweeting the tweets and retweets of others in a special interest group where everyone follows everyone else. This is especially annoying when you use the old fashioned RT or via method of retweeting. It means that everyone who follows everyone else has to read the same tweet six or seven times. Consider the world of Ninja Yoga Masters, which may only have 20 outspoken master members sharing the same few hundred followers. When each of the masters retweets a fellow master’s comment with an old-fashioned RT, we all have to read that comment again. And again. And again. Do you know how annoying that is? Especially when the retweets appear one after the other in our timelines? It’s like the retweeting crew is singing a chorus.
• Retweeting improperly. Someone came up with some words of wisdom or a good one-liner or a link good enough for you to retweet. But instead of doing it properly by using the official Twitter retweet tool (which is now supported by just about all Twitter client software), you paraphrase to shorten or maybe leave out the source. Not very nice, is that? There’s no reason to incorrectly retweet someone else’s tweet. Click the damn Retweet link or button; Twitter does the rest for you, leaving the original in all its glory and properly crediting the source. This helps other people find and possibly follow that source if they find the retweeted content is interesting.

Now I’m not saying that my tweets are perfect. They’re not. There are too many of them to all be good. Indeed, I’ve committed all of these abuses at least once in the past 3+ years. But the growth of Twitter has made abuse like this unacceptable. It’s causing people like me to limit who they follow and to drop Twitter friends because of their annoying retweeting behavior.

What do you think about the retweeting situation on Twitter? Do you have any pet peeves I neglected to include in my list? Don’t be shy! Share them with us. Use the Comments link or form for this post to let us know.

And do me a favor: retweet this post to spread the word. Twitter would be a much better place without so many retweets.

Want to Learn More about Using Twitter?
Learn online at Lynda.com. Recently revised and expanded, my Twitter course includes more than three hours of video training material that’ll help you get more out of Twitter. Check it out. If you’re not a Lynda.com subscriber, be sure to visit to try some of the free videos. I think you’ll be hooked.