The title seems weird doesn’t it? Well, up until now, only 3rd party Twitter clients offered the Retweet (aka RT) functionality and the actual Twitter website didn’t, despite thousands of requests by Twitter users.
On November 5th, Twitter announced that they have “just activated a feature called retweet on a very small percentage of accounts in order to see how it works in the wild.”
Unfortunately it’s not available yet on my account, so I can’t publish a screenshot, however, Twitter did publish a prototype sketch:
For those of you who don’t know what a Retweet is, quite simply, it’s a function which gives you the ability to tweet the exact message someone else tweeted. In other words, if @ChristopherM made a tweet saying “I just won a car”, you could retweet this and it would look along the lines of “Retweeting @ChristopherM I just won a car”.
5 Benefits from Retweeting:
- Gives value to followers
- Empowers personal brands
- Establishes a connection with original tweeter
- Increase traffic to something on the web
- Creates social equity
My opinion: I think it’s great that Twitter adds this to their website. It’s normally the tech-savvy folk who use third party clients and are familiar with the added benefit, so giving this to everyone is a powerfully strategic move from Twitters side.
