Twitter’s RTs: Why you shouldn’t use them

Nov 19, 2009 by TheZargon    No Comments    Posted under: Social Media

It’s all over TwitterVille: The new RTs are being rolled out to users and happiness is not being ReTweeted back to the micro-blogging service that we all love so much.

Literally created by the users, the original RTs are a way of sharing content, that you think is interesting, with your followers coming from people you follow. You pick a tweet, make a comment on it and send it to your timeline. Easy, right? Wrong! At least according to Twitter’s development team.

The new RT feature, as seen by Twitter, is this automated button that doesn’t allow you to insert any comment before or after the original tweet. It is so automated that it looks like it was programmed by some spam developer and not by a team of people that actually use twitter on a daily basis. I would even risk to say that it will become another spammer’s paradise. I will will not be using them and here is a list of reasons why I think no one should:

1. It takes the whole value out of the ReTweet: With every RT you generate value, by adding information and you tell your followers why you are RT that content. Furthermore you might help spread that RT to a more wide audience, by including a specific hashtag for example.
2. RTs are a form of communication, not automation: Thousands of users use it to establish dialogues with others. By way of those interactions users actually gain or loose followers.
3. Twitter should be learning with its users and not the other way around: RTs were invented by users and Twitter should take that as a model, not try to reinvent the wheel: It’s a waste of time and resources.
4. If Twitter, as a service, has showed us something is that the users will always come up with a way of circumventing a new rule they don’t like: Remember when Twitter implemented the rule that if you send a reply/mention to someone, that tweet was only seen by common followers? It didn’t work, did it? Users just started to insert a “.” or whatever before the @username and that broke the rule. Users have the power and we should use it to show Twitter we are not happy birds at the moment.

What do you think? Are you using the new RTs? Do they make any sense to you? Am I missing something? Would love to know!

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!