Why Retweet?

I am assuming at this point that you have heard of Twitter, and know what tweets and retweets are. If not then go Google them, as this article is about why, not what or how. This article is a follow-on to Why Tweet? which gave reasons why you should tweet. 

The most important reason to tweet is to give your followers, and others, access to your thoughts, ideas, experiences, as they might expect from the type of tweets that attracted them to you in the first place. In their eyes you have put yourself forward as someone who will enlighten them on a particular or related subject.  

Justin Bieber tweets about Justin Bieber. His followers would not expect him to enlighten them on rocket science. If he did, the likelihood is that the majority of his followers would not take any notice. 

It is the same for you. If you tweet about a particular subject, you are putting yourself forward as someone:

• who knows about the subject
• has an interest in the subject
• can point others in the direction of interesting information related to that subject
• has an opinion on the subject
• any combination or all of the above.

Note the third item: "can point others in the direction of interesting information related to that subject". Your audience has an interest in what you have to offer, why else would they be followers? If you follow others that have similar interests to yourself, it is inevitable that they will gain access to information; have personal knowledge of the subject; have their own opinions; that they can pass on to you.

They will post tweets that are of interest to you. Those posts are most likely ones that will be of interest to your followers. And the only way they will see the information that they are expecting you to feed them, is for you to pass it on: just like you would in the real world "Hey John, I just heard about a great.......".

No matter what we say, the only reason to do anything is to satisfy our own personal needs. So, what is in it for us to retweet? In "Why Tweet?" I gave reasons why tweeting is a good thing. Those are all reasons that fulfil some personal need. Retweeting fulfils those self-same needs. But what do we actually gain by retweeting?

We tweet, and we gain followers that have an interest in what we microblog about. When we pass on another tweeps informative chatter (assuming it is linked to the subject we are known for) we:

1. Enhance our reputation on the subject matter
2. Sustain our audience, who are hungry for the next morsel of information we have for them
3. Gain a tweep that is indebted to us for retweeting them
4. Probably gain a DM (direct message) thanking us for the RT, enhancing our Twitter reputation
5. Increase our chances of having one or more of our tweets retweeted by the tweep we rt'd
6. Increased the collaborative efforts of our group of followers, such that it becomes a group, rather than just followers.

Remember: Retweeting is a collaboration, not a competition. That is: Why retweet?!