Friday, March 25, 2011
Guest Blog: Re-Tweeting En Masse: Effective Tool or Message Killer?
Friend of Newswise, Aline Schimmel guest blogs today on the topic of retweeting. Aline blogs over at Scienta Communications, where she serves as Principal.
Twitter can be a useful tool to promote company news. Reviewing my Twitter feed today, I’m reminded about one of the major pitfalls of this tool – the en masse tweet or re-tweet. For the uninitiated, a re-tweet (or RT in the vernacular) is a fast and easy way to repeat what another tweep wrote. For example, if you read @NatureBiotech’s post today: “New blogpost: Fighting gravity: venture-backed biotech returns http://bit.ly/dNNcTA,” thought it was an interesting blog entry, and thought the tweeps who follow you might also find it interesting, you could post: “RT @NatureBiotech New blogpost: Fighting gravity: venture-backed biotech returns http://bit.ly/dNNcTA.” Not only would this notify @NatureBiotech that you are reading their tweets and in this case their blog, but it also expands the reach of @NatureBiotech’s tweet to your followers.
By this reasoning, could a company that wants to expand the reach of their tweets beyond their immediate followers encourage other tweeps to RT their postings? Personally, I’d like to think that if a company’s tweet was relevant and important that their followers would RT it voluntarily. However, companies often employee staff with Twitter accounts, some of whom, such as the heads of the communications and/or marketing departments, may tweet in a professional capacity. It would be reasonable to expect and possibly request that those individuals RT the company post if it was a tweet that was relevant to their departments. Since these individuals may be followed on Twitter by reporters, customers, and other industry professionals, their RTs could significantly expand the reach of the company’s message to relevant parties.
In my experience, companies and the agencies that represent them often take this theory to an extreme, encouraging and at times orchestrating mass RT’ing. Unfortunately, two main factors can thwart a mass Twitter outreach effort:
1) If the tweeps who have been instructed to RT a post do not use Twitter in a strictly professional manner and/or have few or no relevant followers, their RT will not advance the message. As with all communications, it’s all about targeting your message to your audience. Thus, it may be more effective to identify four or five staffers who have a moderate-to-high Twitter following and are in industries and/or departments that are relevant to the original company tweet.
2) By RT’ing and not composing unique tweets, the company or agency merely floods Twitterdom with identical tweets, adding nothing to the conversation and diminishing the validity of the original message. In the adapted words of the immortal bard: the company doth re-tweet too much, methinks. Rather, I would recommend that the staffers selected to advance the Twitter message compose tweets that are closely related to the original, but add a new element not included in the original. In this way, rather than tweeps shouting into the wind, the impression of a conversation is created.
By following these two simple guidelines, an organization can avoid another embarrassingly choreographed en masse RT.
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