The Secret To No Retweets-Urooj Kazi, Content Wiz

JustUnfollow.com

Retweets – What?

“Hey look! Cool tweet! Let me share it”.

When you read an awesome tweet and go on to share it with others, it’s called a retweet.

Retweets – How?

• The classic way of retweeting involved adding a ‘RT’ followed by ‘@username’ and then the tweet.

• Twitter eventually built a retweet functionality which lets you RT directly. 

Manual vs. Direct Retweet

This is the original tweet:

Manual vs. Direct Retweet

Here’s a manual retweet of the same tweet:

Manual vs. Direct Retweet

And here’s a retweet using Twitter’s RT button (notice the difference):

Manual vs. Direct Retweets

While the second option looks far more convenient, Twitter’s in-built retweet functionality is lacking in more ways than one. Most

prominently:

• Those who retweet cannot add their own comments to the tweet. See Saundra’s tweet (which says she “#VOTED”), versus Mandy’s (which is exactly the same as the original tweet).

• There seems to be an individuality angle to it, wherein people prefer to retweet manually, so the tweet shows up as having originated in their account.

Moral

Most tweeps RT manually.

And, if you don’t take care of one small thing in your tweet, believe us, you’ll get no manual retweets.

The One Small Thing

The length of your tweet. 

It is common knowledge that tweets on Twitter can be no longer than 140 characters.

Now consider what happened when Saundra retweeted JustUnfollow’s tweet.

Sandra’s Retweet - Analyzed

Her tweet’s character count is about 25 characters more than the original tweet.

It includes a ‘RT’, JustUnfollow’s username, her opinion (#VOTED) and relevant spaces.

So, we, at JustUnfollow, cannot afford to keep the lengths of our tweets longer than 125 characters,

i.e.,

we have to discount a minimum of 15 characters (preferably more) for manual retweets.

Takeaway Math

Count the number of characters in your Twitter username, say (x).

Add 5 to it (x+5).

Subtract it from 140, i.e., 140-(x+5).

This is your maximum tweet character length.

Eg: @justunfollow – 13

13 +5 = 18

140-18 = 122

Our tweets should be a maximum of 122 characters if we want people to manually retweet them.

GO AHEAD, GET THE RTS YOUR TWEETS DESERVE!

That’s It!

Presentation by

www.justunfollow.com

JustUnfollow is the go-to twitter management tool for over 4 million

tweeps.

What about you?