Part of the appeal to microblogging is that it enables people to send and receive information quickly. Sometimes messages and memes take on viral momentum due to the simplicity of the medium, including a case where a young girl from South Carolina went missing and users utilized their networks to spread the word.
How Do You Structure a ‘Retweeted’ Message?
This idea of people posting messages and reposting others’ brings up a great question about retweet formatting. What is the best (or right) way to share information with your network that someone else has shared with you? Here are a few things to consider:
- do you include the name of the person who sent you the message, or the name of the original poster?
- do you reuse the hyperlink (or shortened URL) provided, or create your own?
- do you use the verb “retweeting,” or will “RT” suffice?
- if you want to include a comment with the message, where and how do you do that?
I try to retweet information to my network of followers when I come across something I find interesting, but I also often find myself wanting to add my own thoughts to the message, adding some unique personal value to what I am sharing. I can add my comments at the beginning, but the retweet message might be seen as my own. I can add them to the end, but then it is difficult to distinguish where the original message stops and my message begins. Using parentheses around my contribution seems to help, but it can still be confusing.
Are There Legal Implications Behind Sharing Someone Else’s Content?
Outside of formatting, I’ve also begun to think about the legal ramifications of using others’ content and sharing it under our own names. I reached out to one of our followers on Twitter, Brett J. Trout (@BrettTrout), P.C., an Iowa patent attorney, to talk about this issue:
Lots of intellectual property rights re retweeting tweets. We’ll have to wait ’til enough $$’s at stake to see what a court says -
How do you retweet items you find interesting? Do you take any precautions when adding comments or your own thoughts? Please reply in the comments.
UPDATE 11/23/08, 4:04pm: Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) shared some of his own thoughts on the infectious power of retweeting today, as well as a link to “the Art and Science of Retweeting“, from AJ Vaynerchuk (@ajv).
Rob is one of the founders of Microblink. His interests include how people are using microblogs and the community growing around them.
Mike writes and edits for Microblink day-in and day-out. He is known as the marketing guy and handles most of the microblogging accounts.
Mark writes development-oriented posts as well as news items. He's not afraid to dive headfirst into technical topics for the sake of the team.
I like to use ~ instead of RT.
I use RT @originaltweeternamehere
If there is a URL i keep it in the tweet
Then i generally keep what the person said, but if i have anything to add i’ll figure out if there is room or if i need to modify things.
Other things i have seen work well …
- retweet it with more info
- retweet it with some sort of follow up question
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http://twitter.com/franswaa
Sometimes, if the Tweet is too long to RT or paraphrase, I’ll post my own thoughts along with the (perma-)link to the original Tweet (found where the date and timestamp is). The main drawback is that the originial Tweet and the fact that I’ve re-Tweeted it won’t be obvious at first glance and won’t be picked up in search. Though this should provide adequate credit, I believe. Good points you make about considering legal implications.
Great suggestions everyone!
@Rob The ~ is definitely an interesting take, but I’m not sure it would be widely recognized by others.
@Frank The more I think about it, retweeting the tweet verbatim seems like the best option, then possibly a follow up tweet with my comments.
@Helen I was thinking about what you suggested earlier this afternoon (posting my comment plus a link to the tweet permalink), though you’re also right that at first glance it wouldn’t be recognized as a retweet or include credit as visibly as including the person’s username.
I like Helen’s idea, something like this would work
RT @microblink linktotweet then i’ll add my comments after the link
at least it’ll be clear that I’m retweeting something, and the brain is smart enough to work backwards if someone reads the text before the original tweet. I think ‘RT’ is the most universally used/recognized indicator, though there’s no reason a tilde wouldn’t work.
Thanks for this, I have been mulling the value of retweets for a bit now. First, in regard to format, I use RT@… for brevity. If space allows, I usually put in a comment as to why I’m retweeting. Not too long ago, I tweeted that “Retweets are the new thank-you”. I like mixing them into my own thoughts and conversations with others, when appropriate. I always give credit, to the first person, and if space allows, also where I found it. However, I have to say, one thing that worries me is that lately I’ve gotten a lot of “followers” who appear to be spammers. I can’t block them quick enough. So if I re-tweet things only to have spammers follow the @’s, have I done anyone any favors? I would also like to hear more on the legalities of content sharing on Twitter.
I use RT or retweet. usually i leave as is adding another tweet after if i’d like to expand on the convo.
@Lisa We find RTs to be very valuable as well. One thing it does is help to build connections between people who are following you and the people that you follow. By retweeting a good resource or link you find so that your own followers can benefit from it, you create an opportunity for them to make another connection on Twitter.
As for spammers, I think the Twitter community takes care of them quickly enough that you don’t need to be worried about spammers picking up on retweets.