After reading how you should plan out your tweets, I thought of how you can fully utilize groups when retweeting. There are many Twitter clients out there, but I use HootSuite to schedule tweets and create custom columns or groups of specific people you follow. Creating these specific columns, which we can thank to Twitter clients, allow for you to keep tract of any tweet that you may have missed.
Think about how much time you spend scrolling through your home feed and retweeting what was just tweeted. And when you usually make that retweet as soon as the person tweeted it. Doing this not only wastes valuable time, but it makes retweeting the content a “joke”.
What is the purpose of retweeting?
There are times when something you retweet is valuable to the followers that are following you and not the person who originally tweeted. Then, there are times when you retweet what your followers already received from that person who originally made the tweet. I believe the true purpose of retweeting is to help out the person who originally made the tweet by spreading out their content.
Theoretically, if Pete Cashmore from Mashable tweeted “Drunk Driver in Texas to be Named on Twitter“, his 1.8 million followers could all make two decisions. First, they could all retweet this to most likely everyone that has already seen the tweet, which would not be very valuable. Or they could spread out the tweet throughout the whole entire day, without Pete or anyone on Mashable having to tweet the article again, so anyone that might have missed it when it was first tweeted.
How do you prevent yourself from retweeting right away?
Create customized columns with your Twitter client.
Think about the typical people that you follow and retweet what they have tweeted. Group these people together and keep in mind that the more followers you have the more columns you will want to think about creating. For instance, if you have 1,000 followers or less than 5 columns should allow you to have all the retweets you want to make later all ready at the top and not “hidden”. On the other hand, if you have say over 10,000 followers, I would consider that you create more specified columns.
From doing this, you will ensure the mission of retweeting what you wanted to retweeted is completed and valuable.
@JohnAguiar
Nice tip.. helps make RT’s a lil more organized.
@webtw
Hey Derek – I really like the point you make regarding immediate ReTweeting not necessarily being the most helpful thing to do, and to space out your RTs. But I think the key thing here, especially when using Hootsuite is, after nicely organizing your columns, to then schedule out your RTs for the whole day instead of RT-ing immediately. This means you can also take care of the RT while it’s still fresh in your mind. I love Hootsuite for many reasons, the ability to schedule future tweets being one of them!
Are there any instances in which you think immediate RT-ing IS the best thing to do? Or is that a whole other blog post?!
@uttermag
John, Thank for the comment.
Lucy, I do agree with you that if you use HootSuite you need to take advantage of scheduling RTs later.
I would say that I would RT something that is pertinent, so like if there was say a live show on UStream, I would RT it right away or if I knew for sure the RT would reach a new set of followers.
But, I do think too it could also be talked about more in another post.
Best Regards,
Derek
@Kiss_N_Atl
Yes, I agree with Luch re: using Hootsutie for scheduled tweets. I also know that the majority of my followers have nothing (or not a lot) to do with the people I follow so I get to pass on a lot of useful information to a broader audience.
@rawetk
I follow cerain news, political, etc Twitter sites. I receive their Tweets
(ie: CNN, John McCain, Whitehouse, Time) However, these sites do not provide a “dele” or “trashcan” symbal. They are cluttering my file.
How do I delete those Tweets that I hv read and do not wish to retain.
Wud apprec any help.