Please Retweet
SteveI know, we are all overloaded.
Blogs, Facebook news feeds, Twitter streams, LinkedIn discussions.
Friend requests, new follower alerts, updated profiles, experiences, skills....
RSS feed reader absolutely overflowing. That is until you (somewhat guiltily) proclaim 'Reader Bankruptcy' with a blanket 'mark all as read' click. Don't worry, your friends will never know that the blog posts that they spent ages poring over and parsing every last word of to make sure they were just right were subjected to burial in the mass landfill of unread clutter. At least they won't be lonely, I'll bet there are about 273 (about three days' worth) of 'Mashable' posts alongside them.
There is no time. Or not enough time anyway. So folks that blog have to realize this. So little time for the audience to read these posts, even less to comment on them, and certainly no time or tolerance to manually cut and paste an interesting post's URL into TweetDeck, or HootSuite, or whatever to actually share it with their networks (who are all likely too busy themselves).
Enter the 'Retweet' button. Most all blog posts today carry the little green thingy. A small, simple, and clever device meant to make the sharing of the post or article almost effortless. One click, a quick permission to grant, one more click - and voila, the piece is shared on Twitter, and the little 'retweet' counter ratchets up by one, like a kind of dynamic tote board of popularity (or antipathy). The retweet button is a kind of bailout for the reader, telling them effectively 'no need to work too hard to indicate you enjoyed the post by commenting', just spend 26 seconds on a few clicks and we as bloggers will get the idea.
I rarely check the traffic statistics of this blog. I have no idea how many e-mail subscribers there are (although one nice lady subscriber in Kansas is 'out of the office' a lot). But I can see that little 'retweet' button on all the posts. So sure, it is a little dismaying after posting what you think was a solid piece to see that little counter sitting on 3 or 4 after a long day waiting patiently for just a bit of attention.
So here is the little experiment for today - will writing a post with 'Please Retweet' as the title actually help the promotion and sharing of the piece? Will it matter that the piece itself has about 400 words of nonsense all leading up the big payoff - the little green button?
Just be glad I went this route, the alternative was going with a post called 'Like me on Facebook', which is a little demented, creepy, and sad.
Please retweet!
Reader Comments (7)
Steve,
I will retweet and comment.
My comment is that I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds. Not always does the retweet button appear along side the post via this method (e.g., WelcomeToTheOccupation blog [shameless plug]).
It's worth noting that you can set your reader to have a "send to" button at the bottom of the post in order to send to Twitter. I use this constantly to retweet.
And also "sharing" an article via "Google" is also a nice thing to do too.
The retweet button that appears at every post. It gives the count of how many times there's been a tweet on Twitter that links back to your blog entry via the bit.ly short URL Tweetmeme or others provide. (Hint: if you want this count to increase, when you tweet about your entry, use the "retweet" function on the button: it'll propagate the correct bit.ly URL.) The Retweet count can be misleading, where the number of visits to the site is significantly smaller or larger than the count.
bit.ly offers a count of how many times someone has come to an entry by clicking on any bit.ly link to it -- whether or not it's the one that the retweet button provides. So, you can convert not very exciting "tweets" into much more exciting "clicks". bit.ly provides a "Sidebar Bookmarklet": http://bit.ly/pages/tools/sidebar. When you are on a single post page, you click the bookmarklet and - presto! - a sidebar appears showing how many tweets and how many clicks there are respecting the post. For example: 24 entries can generate a total of 156 tweets, which in turn can lead to 456 clicks back to your blog. Meanign 7 retweets can generate 89 clicks... the point is your article can go viral even if there are not that many retweets.
It is a bit sad but true that any tweet with the word "Twitter" in it is bound to be re-tweeted many more times than a very similar tweet without the word "Twitter" in it. So if you write a blog article and tweet it out, put Twitter in the title if you want that re-tweet love.
@Paul - Thanks - I am starting to rely on shared items in Reader as one of the essential bits of information I look at each day
@Yosie - thanks for the information. I was sort of being cheeky with this post, but I do appreciate the insight.
@Steven - I do get that. Ages ago I wrote a couple of 'Who to Follow on Twitter for HR people' posts that are still the most viewed posts on this blog.
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