We’ve seen it more and more lately: the “retweet”-phenomenon at Twitter. It’s used when someone wants to highlight an interesting tweet to others. We blogged about a Youtube-meme last week and retweet is in many cases nothing less than a powerful way to spread memes virally. Or, like Kristofer Mencák explains it:
It is a phenomenon that spreads a meme faster to new networks through weak ties. Basically, novel information reaches further and faster through these weak ties within the network as a whole.
For a marketer, this adds another dimension to the talking in the microblogosphere. Like Kristofer also pointed out in his blog post, a retweet actually shows what people are willing to spread to each other:
I think the monitoring of microblogs in general is important, but monitoring retweets adds an extra dimension, as it is basically monitoring memes that have proved themselves as having viral potential. These can spread – good or bad!
There are more interesting phenomenas at Twitter, like for example hashtags. Hashtags have been helped by 3rd-part services like Summize (now Twitter Search), and in the same way, the “retweet”-phenomenon gets a lot of help by services like Friendfeed and Facebook. For instance, when Robert Scoble retweets something, not only his Twitter-followers but also his Friendfeed-followers and his Facebook-friends get notified. This way, the message gets further spreading, which makes the phenomenon even stronger.
And like Jeremiah Owyang wrote in a comment on his great blog post on the same topic, retweets could be a better way to monitoring influence in the microblogosphere than links (which it is in blogs, generally).
In blogs, we’d used to say that ‘links’ were the most valuable aspect.
Now it’s retweets.
Tags: microblogging, retweet, Trends, twitter
November 24, 2008 at 16:59
Thanks for the mention!
I will try to keep thinking about this. It’s a very interesting topic! =)
Kristofer Mencák
November 24, 2008 at 19:55
So is this about twingly creating a kind of TweetRank? Or building a twitter search based on retweets?
November 24, 2008 at 20:36
@Kristofer Mencák: You inspired me a lot with your well-written blog post!
@Hanta: well, nice ideas! Haven’t thinking of it before but using retweets as a parameter of search rankings could of course be possible! Thanks!
November 24, 2008 at 23:00
@Anton & @Hanta: I think this is a brilliant example of how you can actually get very nice feedback through social media.
Twingly might just have gotten a new parameter to use for search rankings. Love it! =)
November 25, 2008 at 11:32
Just in case you make billions with a new retweeting ranking algo…. I´ve never been to sweden
A daily portion of social media for your business is like “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” for your body
November 30, 2008 at 23:06
[...] My post inspired Anton (also blogging here), from blog search engine Twingly, to write The Microblogging Phenomenon Retweet. [...]
December 4, 2008 at 05:37
Anton,
Some good points in this blog post. I like your thought about the progression from blogroll or blog reaction to retweet.
I think that monitoring retweets can help expose non trivial connections between people (social graph) and without some effort influencers.
I think that there are more to learn from actions on Twitters. I wrote about causality between certain tweet and “qwitters” here: http://usingit.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/one-tweet-three-qwitters/ I think that the opposite is doable too i.e. finding tweets that gets you more followers (some could be retweets:)).
Keren
December 28, 2008 at 19:12
[...] are great indication of the originator’s topical influence and the audience’s interest. Recently, after [...]
January 9, 2009 at 11:50
[...] genannt Tweetback. Ich will ja nicht angeben, aber das habe ich Twingly auf Basis von Retweets schon vor fast 2 Monaten vorgeschlagen. Zu den Likes bei Twingly hätte man einfach die Twetbacks zählen [...]
January 10, 2009 at 21:04
[...] to how much their tweets are re-tweeted seems to follow the same line of thought: Retweets are great indication of the originator’s topical influence and the audience’s [...]
January 15, 2009 at 06:16
[...] to that the integration of Twitter in blogs or Facebook, new kinds of blog tools, especially Tumblr, that offer re-blogs, [...]
January 15, 2009 at 16:00
[...] Facebook, skapa fan-page på Facebook och bjud in alla vänner, posta länken på din microblogg (retweets gör Twitter extremt viral) och blogga om det på din vanliga blogg. Amerikanska tjänster som också bör kikas på, [...]
January 26, 2009 at 12:13
[...] Facebook, skapa fan-page på Facebook och bjud in alla vänner, posta länken på din microblogg (retweets gör Twitter extremt viral) och blogga om det på din vanliga blogg. Amerikanska tjänster som också bör kikas på, [...]
January 28, 2009 at 23:00
[...] not on twitter, what are you waiting for? You’re missing some deals, man. Make sure you retweet cool [...]
February 1, 2010 at 23:13
[...] to that the integration of Twitter in blogs or Facebook, new kinds of blog tools, especially Tumblr, that offer re-blogs, [...]