Glenn's blog

Do you use Twitter to promote your own blog, website, or events?

If so, you probably hope that people will pick up your tweet and retweet it – potentially spreading the reach of your message by thousands, if not more.

For those of you who don't use Twitter or are new to it, a "retweet" is when someone reads your tweet and shares it themselves. It's often done by adding a "RT" to the beginning of the tweet and sending it out. Try it, it's fun. It's also a nice thing to do. Twitter now has a built in retweet function that simplifies the process.

When you write your original tweet that you hope will get retweeted, my little piece of advice is to make it short enough that anyone will be able to retweet it without having to edit it at all. Let's face it, we're all pretty lazy, and if it's going to take me a minute or two to edit your tweet so that I can be nice and retweet it, I'm probably not going to do it.

Someone I know tweeted this morning about a new blog post he'd written. When I went to retweet it, I was 16 characters over the limit. It wasn't all that important to me, so I abandoned it and didn't bother retweeting.

It's just a small thing, but I think it's important. And usually easy to account for if you think about it when you're writing your tweet. Make things easy for people who want to help you.