The power of the RT for business

The power of the RT for business

The moment Twitter crashed on Oscars night will go down in history as it tried to cope with the retweets of Ellen DeGeneres’ star studded selfie. Retweeting is a vital part of interaction on Twitter and is a particularly useful tool for business. Julian Thompson, Head of Digital at MOSH, says ‘It is pretty hard churning out really great original content regularly. Make sure you carefully curate what you retweet so you aren’t sending out popular, but ultimately irrelevant content for your brand.’

There are a number of benefits to retweeting in building a brand’s following. By retweeting, the author will see you and most likely follow you. If they thank you for the RT, all their followers will see you. Thanking for RTs is a commonplace activity on Twitter. Thompson elaborates ‘Twitter has a community feel, manners work on the internet as they do in real life. By retweeting, you are saying to your followers the author’s content is trusted and it works the other way round too. If you produce something original, be sure to thank as many retweeters as possible and have a look at their profiles. You may find someone with a large following and are able to start up a conversation which will be read by everyone, furthering your reach.’

Retweeting shows others you are interested in sharing helpful material rather than continuously promoting your own brand. Thompson explains, ‘This follows the basic ethos of MOSH in social media marketing: If you are interesting, relevant and useful to your customers, your brand will be rewarded.’

Jon Randles, Head of Strategy at MOSH explains how to give yourself the best chance of getting your original content tweeted. ‘The most obvious thing to do is ask your followers to ‘please RT.’ It’s only one click for them to do it so you aren’t impinging on their personal time. Also they have chosen to follow you so clearly like what you are about.’ Statistically, asking people to RT works. The bulk of retweets also have links in them. Randles shares a rather surprising statistic, ‘The Flesch-Kincaid test indicates the sophistication and readability of text. When you run the test across the highest number of retweets, high brow material does well. So don’t dumb down your content. Well written, original ideas will do well. A proliferation of exclamation marks and slang won’t.’

As Google keep telling us, well written, relevant content is the key to SEO. And, it would seem, popularity on Twitter; unless of course, you are in the presence of the world’s biggest A-Listers and have a smartphone about your person.

ENDS

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