It took me some time to understand exactly what RT meant in Twitter. I had tweeted a tweet about something. Then I noticed someone had put an RT in front of my tweet. I wondered why and what did that accomplish. RT means “retweet” in Twitter talk. I had in my head it meant “reply to” but I was wrong.
I tried to figure out what the reply was to me from whomever put the RT in front of my tweet. I never got a message.
Wandering around the Internet I found the answer. Let me try to illustrate just what this RT is all about. Let’s take Twitterer A and Twitterer B.
Twitterer A has 10 people who “follows” A’s tweets. Twitterer B has 10 more different people who “follow B.” That means those people who “follow” Twitterer A get to see every tweet A sends out (except Direct tweets). So when A writes a significant tweet about something of interest, Twitterer B (who follows A) thinks the tweet should interest the 10 people who follow B. Since the 10 people who follow B are different people than follows A Twitterer A simply RTs A’s tweet. That results in 10 more people get to read A’s original tweet bring the total exposure of A’s original tweet to 20, rather than just the original 10 followers of A.
See how a single tweet can become geometically increased to a wider audience?
If I didn’t make sense here, go read The Art of ReTweeting. There you will learn about some etiquitte applicable to RTing.
Imagine that the Nye County Democratic Central Committee used Twitter to communicate with the 9000 Democrats in Nye County.
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