- Image via CrunchBase, source unknown
The retweet — or RT as it is commonly used now — is becoming ever more popular on Twitter. Someone posts a tweet that you find interesting, you “retweet” it to your followers to make sure they see it. Echo chamber issues aside, this is causing Twitter to become an even better tool for spreading information. (Check out Dan Zarrella’s post What’s in a Retweet? for some good data on the topic.)
The format for retweets seems to be settling around the following:
“RT: @sendername original tweet”
Short, sweet, effective. There’s just one issue. I find my self constantly editing my tweets to get them down to just under Twitter’s 140 character limit. However, if my post is 140 characters then there is no room for anyone else to retweet my message. My message hasn’t been packaged in a way that it can spread in this medium.
So, I am now imposing a new “retweetable limit” rule on my twitter posts. I will now limit the length of all my tweets to leave enough characters for others to easily spread the message. Each user’s retweetable limit is unique, since it is based on the length of their twitter name. You can calculate your retweetable limit by counting the characters in your twitter name, adding six, and subtracting that total from 140. (Six comes from the characters “R”, “T”, “:”, ” “, “@”, and an additional ” ” after your twitter name.) Hence @toddsampson — 11 + 6 = 17 — has a retweetable limit of 123. Alternatively, instead of counting up to my 123 limit, I will just make sure that I leave a number greater than 17 in the available character limit for my tweets.
Go ahead and spread the word on making your tweets retweetable.
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