Lolo 3 weeks ago
« Sign of the Times: Wells Fargo & Wachovia launch a Merger Blog
Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter »
60

How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets

Categories: MicroMedia, Word of MouthPosted on January 5th, 2009

I’m on a Twitter hiatus and am not tweeting for a while, instead, I’m focusing on what Forrester calls energizing, what others may refer to as “word of mouth’. So instead, I’m going to conduct experiments to help my clients understand how to best use social tools to allow content to spread for person to person.

While social media ‘chicklets’ already exist that make it easy to make blog posts diggable, tagged on delicious, or emailed to others, we’ve often forgotten to recognize one of the most powerful behaviors: the retweet.

As a result, every single one of my future blog posts will have easy-to-use, copy and paste content that is designed to be rapidly tweeted to your followers –or until a technology emerges that makes it easier.

I’m not going to tweet this post, but want you to spread it to your twitter followers by copying and pasting this code into twitter and share with others

If You Read This, Tweet This to your Followers:

How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets http://snipurl.com/9ii28

What are you waiting for? copy the above sentence, put it into the twitter form bar and share it! Let’s spread the word how bloggers can easily benefit from viral sharing by making it easy for blog posts to be retweeted. Sometimes it’s the simple things in life that take off, so I’ll write a wrap up post measuring the impacts of this experiment. (Update: The findings are now live, see the data after 24 hours)

So How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets? Make it easy for their readers to tweet it, by creating simple copy and a shortened URL and include it at the bottom of each blog post. Thanks for tweeting, and retweeting this.

(Update: you can track the tweets here, here, here and here)

Share This Post:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Google Bookmarks
  • Reddit
  • Technorati
  • LinkedIn
  • FriendFeed
  • StumbleUpon
  • Twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 at 7:00 pm and is filed under MicroMedia, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

60 Comments »

60 Responses to “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets”

« Older Comments

  1. Great post. Retweets are a signal of quality, and publishers should do everything they can to encourage them.

    We’ve been thinking along these same lines at HubSpot and created an app to simplify the process you’re talking about.

    The app is called TweetIt. We’re releasing it tonight, and you can
    find it here: http://twitter.grader.com/tweetit

    This post shows it in action: http://bit.ly/Vk88



    2. Posted by Rick Burnes on January 5th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

  2. Retweeting is a great feature. It really allows stuff to go viral on twitter.

    When the phishing attack happened the other day there was a million retweets about it that really spread the warning.



    3. Posted by Jared O'Toole on January 5th, 2009 at 7:34 pm

  3. Well if you really would go for it you would ask for a plugin for wordpress so you can have your specific text for this post ‘tweetyfied’ as in make it directly tweetable.

    I used that for my podcast interviews recently and it worked nicely plus gave me searchable tweets. I know there is a plugin available where you even can choose your fav url shortener service. :)



    4. Posted by Nicole Simon on January 5th, 2009 at 7:40 pm

  4. Since you’re not Tweeting this week, re-tweeting (um, can i call it that if it is a comment?) my tweet linking to your post tweeting about… oh heck. :-) Here:

    RTs=powerful (http://bit.ly/8ny0 by @danzarella). i agree re: encourage/make simple. But @jowyang this feels spoon-feedy: http://bit.ly/euY8



    5. Posted by Laura "Pistachio" Fitton on January 5th, 2009 at 7:51 pm

  5. Thanks Laura

    Yup, “spoon feedy” means I make it easy, but why wouldn’t a blogger? If they put all the other chicklets (digg, delicious, email) why wouldn’t they make it easy to tweet and retweet?



    6. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 5th, 2009 at 7:57 pm

  6. Laura

    BTW, I’ll track your bit.ly too

    http://search.twitter.com/search?q=http://bit.ly/euY8



    7. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 5th, 2009 at 7:57 pm

  7. There is a plugin for WordPress that accomplishes this -> http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-this/

    Is that what you are talking about?



    8. Posted by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 5th, 2009 at 10:43 pm

  8. RTs is an interesting way to tweak the signal. They may strengthen it inside a constituted network as well as act as an echo chamber, as we saw during Mumbai events…

    Please keep us updated with what will emerge with those experiments, Jeremiah.



    9. Posted by Thierry de Baillon on January 6th, 2009 at 3:23 am

  9. Andy

    I think that’s it, thanks for bringing that to my attention.



    10. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 6th, 2009 at 3:38 am

  10. Sorry, but that’s not that surprising, isn’t it?



    11. Posted by Gerald Hensel on January 6th, 2009 at 4:15 am

  11. Gerald

    It’s not, but how many bloggers have encouraged their readers to retweet a blog post on each of their posts?

    What’s surprising isn’t the fact that it works, but the fact that few bloggers have taken advantage of it, I’m sure we’ll see an uptick in ‘tweet this post’ going forward.



    12. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 6th, 2009 at 4:22 am

  12. [...] How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets From Web Strategy by Jeremiah: A piece of simple advice that every blogger should follow. [...]



    13. Posted by 100+ Resources to Boost Your Social Media Savvy in 2009: Top Tips & Advice from the Experts on January 6th, 2009 at 5:37 am

  13. There’s a way to make it even easier and doesn’t require the reader to copy and paste the tweet. You can make a link by using this HTML code in your post:

    http://twitter.com/home?status=

    Put your text after the equals sign (you’ll have to convert spaces to “%20″). This puts the reader on their Twitter home page with the text box pre-filled. Each “%20″ will be converted to a space, so you can actually go a little over the 140 character limit. Your example tweet above would be

    http://twitter.com/home?status=How%20Bloggers%20Should%20Inspire%20Retweets%20http://snipurl.com/9ii28



    14. Posted by Will on January 6th, 2009 at 7:32 am

  14. Hello Jeremiah – I love how you can go on hiatus from twitter and come back with a suggestion on how best to leverage it. Perhaps looking at things from a distance gave you new perspective?

    Thanks for the idea!



    15. Posted by Andrea Hill on January 6th, 2009 at 8:15 am

  15. [...] Morning juice from @swoodruff right here: http://TwitPWR.com/1ur/ (just cut-and-paste. This idea inspired by the ever-brilliant Jeremiah [...]



    16. Posted by Five in the Morning 010609 « StickyFigure on January 6th, 2009 at 8:24 am

  16. There is brilliance in the simplicity of it. BTW, how can one take a hiatus from Twitter. I’d go stark raving mad.



    17. Posted by Scott Schablow on January 6th, 2009 at 10:17 am

  17. Scott

    I’m much more focused now actually. Things are much clearer now, including thinking up this experiment.



    18. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 6th, 2009 at 10:22 am

  18. Brilliant, Jeremiah! Thinking that retweeting should also be added to tools like ShareThis, to make it drop-dead easy for readers to retweet good posts that they’re reading.

    @BryanPerson



    19. Posted by Bryan Person on January 6th, 2009 at 10:28 am

  19. Jeremiah:

    BTW, wondering how you created the short URL before you had published the actual post. Or, did you publish, shorten the URL, and then edit your post?

    If you’re looking for good metrics on clickthroughs of short URLs, check out BudURL, too.



    20. Posted by Bryan Person on January 6th, 2009 at 10:31 am

  20. Jeremiah,
    I do agree with your point that retweets are a great way to have something go viral, but I would say that the short-cut of the link is, in most cases, not the bottleneck at all. It’s more that the content is not something that warrants retweeting, in most cases. Seth Godin’s writing on what makes something “remarkable” – worthy of being remarked on – in the Purple Cow sense, is the key goal.

    It would be interesting to note whether the same content that is re-tweeted is the same type of content that is remarked on in a word-of-mouth context.

    It would be interesting to see what makes a post most “retweetable” – top 10’s? thought pieces? controversial posts?

    Thanks for the post Jeremiah, much enjoyed.



    21. Posted by Steven Woods on January 6th, 2009 at 11:01 am

  21. Bryan, I created post, then quickly put it into snipurl then modified post –all within seconds.



    22. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 6th, 2009 at 11:17 am

  22. Hm. Not sure I’m with you on this one Jeremiah – that wouldn’t BE a retweet. If I tweeted your URL, and someone ELSE picked it up and said “RT @GeekMommy – How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets http://snipurl.com/9ii28” then it would be.

    Otherwise it’s just making it simple for readers to tweet your blog post. Given how many plugins, bookmarklets, tracking URL-shorteners there are out there, all I’d be doing is providing something for my readers to *tweet* it in the first place.

    But that’s NOT the power of the retweet. The power of the retweet is when something is so strong on TWITTER that it gets repeated and echoed throughout the streams.

    :\



    23. Posted by Lucretia Pruitt on January 6th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

  23. Thanks for the great idea Jeremiah. I searched and found a plug-in for Wordpress users that automatically inserts a link or a customizable icon to each blog post so that with one click a Twitter user can tweet about your post. It’s called “Tweet This” and can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-this/

    With a few clicks it’s now on every blog post.

    Cheers,

    Shane Gibson



    24. Posted by Shane Gibson on January 6th, 2009 at 12:17 pm

  24. This is really a very clever idea–thanks for the post!



    25. Posted by Ashley McFarland on January 6th, 2009 at 12:29 pm

  25. ShareThis already provides all of the functionality that you want. I have it on my WordPress blog.

    Choose Twitter from the chicklet. It launches a new browser tab with twitter loaded and inserts the blog post title and shortened URL. You click Update.

    Only thing I would change is to use http://www.cl.ig instead of tinyurl for URL shortening. Love their stats and social media tracking, including Twitter, Friend Feed and more.



    26. Posted by Jim Spencer on January 6th, 2009 at 12:36 pm

  26. Lucretia

    You’re right, but nuances aside, the experiment is running –and working. People are both tweeting and retweeting it.



    27. Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 6th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

  27. [...] pour les professionnels du Web que nous sommes. Je le trouve également très utile dans une stratégie de marketing social. Je l’utilise quotidiennement pour faire la promotion de mes [...]



    28. Posted by Twitter pour Obama, Britney, mais pas le grand public | Ze Laurent | Video & Social Web Marketing Expert on January 6th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

  28. Wonderful suggestion. –> Always make it EASY for your advocates to spread your message.

    Feel free to retweet me =)
    @AmyStark



    29. Posted by Amy Stark on January 6th, 2009 at 1:06 pm

  29. This is what I would call the technological version of word-of-mouth. It’s not only a great way to market somebody, it is also a great way to gain credibility. If you retweet things of value, you will than be looked upon as a resource for valuable information. I am going to retweet this now.



    30. Posted by Scott Mahler-Datex Media on January 6th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

  30. Sorry, I misspelled the URL in comment 25 – http://cli.gs/



    31. Posted by Jim Spencer on January 6th, 2009 at 1:50 pm

  31. Basically what is needed is a Digg This, Sphere This, Delicious This button for Twitter that hooks up to a URL shortening service that also has some nice measurement tools (Tweetburner or the like). Will got the ball rolling above.



    32. Posted by Kami Huyse on January 6th, 2009 at 1:52 pm

  32. I developed a very simple, light-weight Wordpress plugin called Retweet that covers this topics exactly.



    33. Posted by Ash on January 6th, 2009 at 2:26 pm

  33. Hey Jeremiah,

    Retweets definitely are important and I am confident that tweeting posts/retweeting posts will become even more popular in 2009. You will definitely see more “Tweet This” buttons appearing on blogs.

    To support this, I have recently developed an AJAX WordPress plugin (for WP2.7) that allows users to tweet about your blog post. Although I have only just finished developing it and need to polish the rough edges, its definitely working quite nicely. Take a look here http://is.gd/eIS6 for a demonstration and let me know what you think. I’d definitely love some feedback!



    34. Posted by Jon Bergan on January 6th, 2009 at 3:15 pm

  34. I think TwitThis accomplishes this as well -> http://twitthis.com/



    35. Posted by Andy Brudtkuhl on January 6th, 2009 at 3:33 pm

  35. Wow! What a great blog post and the comments were valuable too. I think this is a great example for people just getting started to create great habits for their blogs and getting support in growing a strong following.

    I do think that in terms of SEO and rankings, the RT (retweet) is a valuable way to improve! You can even check to see which of your tweets are : http://www.retweetrank.com/



    36. Posted by Ann Evanston on January 6th, 2009 at 4:14 pm

  36. [...] I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, I’m on a Twitter hiatus which gives a unique opportunity to try out some [...]



    37. Posted by Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter on January 6th, 2009 at 6:13 pm

  37. Share this is another plug-in that lets you automatically Tweet a post. Here’s a screen capture of the tool: http://tinyurl.com/9pwjn4



    38. Posted by Scott Hepburn on January 6th, 2009 at 6:40 pm

  38. [...] Blog post alone isn’t the solution as Forrester’s Jermiah Owyang has recently discovered; need to add viral and urgency through twitter. Add a twitter url and hashtag for your followers to use, making it easier to promote, track, aggregate through search and measure [...]



    39. Posted by When Every Little Bit Really Does Count « SoV-Share of Voice on January 6th, 2009 at 11:13 pm

  39. I use a plugin called Tweet This. It automatically sets up a tweet and shortens the url, but they can add their own if they want to.



    40. Posted by Colleen on January 7th, 2009 at 12:32 am

  40. [...] Another fellow blogger placed an interesting blog post on How Bloggers Should Inspire RetweetsHere’s a brief overviewWeb Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing. Jeremiah Owyang discusses how web tools and social media enable companies to connect with customers ….. name (required). email ( will not be shown ) (required). website … [...]



    41. Posted by Email Marketing Strategy » Blog Archive » How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets on January 7th, 2009 at 3:19 am

  41. [...] How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets [...]



    42. Posted by Using Twitter to Publicize Events « Social Media Mama on January 7th, 2009 at 4:40 am

  42. Jeremiah
    Great idea! Hope this becomes a common protocol. Plus, if you are using a trackable link, you can quantify the power of your Twitter peeps in spreading your link.

    My question is this: What to you would be the ideal protocol for who should own the tracking on these links? Should you ask users to use your link so you can keep your tracking (after all, it’s your post) or should you put the post out there with the idea of retweeting – even if they change your link? Seems like there is no evolved courtesy or protocol for this yet, but adding a simple suggestion would do the trick.

    If only there were a better way to put up Twitter feedback to posts on the original blog. Hoping that will evolve.



    43. Posted by Tiffany Monhollon on January 7th, 2009 at 9:26 am

  43. [...] Owyang did a really cool experiment on his blog post “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” which was a riculously simple and still impressive way of getting your content or blog posts [...]



    44. Posted by Do You Need Help With Your Social Media Marketing? - Ask Your Audience | Inbounder on January 7th, 2009 at 9:56 am

  44. [...] How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets [...]



    45. Posted by Links # 3 & 4-Advertise On Twitter, Get The Best Price On Gadgets on January 7th, 2009 at 10:34 am

  45. [...] How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets [...]



    46. Posted by What I’ve been reading on the web | Chris Deary on January 7th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

  46. [...] this has been one of my most popular blogs to date, and inspired by a ReTweet experiement going by Jeremiah Owyang, I’m inviting you to easily ReTweet this blog by copying the following line and pasting it in [...]



    47. Posted by 40 Tips For A More Fulfilling, Greener Life | ParkHowell.com on January 8th, 2009 at 2:16 pm

  47. [...] jeremiah_owyang placed an interesting blog post on How Bloggers Should Inspire RetweetsHere’s a brief overviewEmail Marketing Strategy » Blog Archive » How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets January 7th, 2009 3:19 am. […] Another fellow blogger placed an interesting blog post on How Bloggers Should Inspire RetweetsHere’s a brief overviewWeb … [...]



    48. Posted by Email Marketing Systems » Blog Archive » How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets on January 12th, 2009 at 12:30 am

  48. [...] (thanks jeremiah for the tip) Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)The WTFsRelationship Selling ™ is still vitalThe Known Lie…Ann Curry: Today’s lovable nut talks about climbing Kilimanjaro [...]



    49. Posted by i don’t need you « best in the world on January 12th, 2009 at 9:08 am

  49. [...] linking back (re-tweeting) below your blog post (like commnets). Jeremiah Owyang also posted “How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets” – which sparked some thought and discussion as [...]



    50. Posted by TweetSuite Rocks - Twitter and WordPress Integration | Get A New Browser on January 12th, 2009 at 1:39 pm

  50. Inspire Retweets? How does it work?



    51. Posted by Branchenverzeichnis on January 17th, 2009 at 11:15 am

  51. [...] blog posts on Twitter, then when I left Twitter, noticed a significant loss in traffic. Yesterday, I did a blog post encouraging others to tweet then retweet my blog post, as you know, being on a Twitter hiatus gives a unique opportunity to try out some [...]



    52. Posted by Findings: Why You Don’t Need to Tweet to Get Traffic from Twitter on January 19th, 2009 at 5:56 am

  52. ahh OK



    53. Posted by Branchenverzeichnis Schweiz on January 21st, 2009 at 12:13 pm

  53. I wonder if there is a way to integrate this into a custom social network



    54. Posted by social network software on January 21st, 2009 at 4:54 pm

  54. Very nice experiment! I especially like the commenters’ points on existing tools, and the challenges put out to improve Twitter’s tools!



    55. Posted by Mark Cummuta on January 22nd, 2009 at 12:23 pm

  55. cool… yet being very green to all this, how does it work???



    56. Posted by Laura Fox on January 27th, 2009 at 2:39 pm

  56. [...] Jeremiah Owyang – How bloggers should inspire retweets. [...]



    57. Posted by Tweet-a-tweet | The Red Pill Manifesto on January 28th, 2009 at 9:40 am

  57. I wonder what I would ask Mahler if I had the chance to travel back in time and meet him in person.



    58. Posted by Jesus Montara on February 22nd, 2009 at 1:34 pm

  58. [...] – “Oh my god retweets are sooo cool, can you believe Jeremiah Owyang is talking about retweets, [...]



    59. Posted by 7 Reasons Why Twitter Is Exactly Like 8th Grade « Movement Strategy on March 9th, 2009 at 9:52 am

  59. [...] How Bloggers Should Inspire Retweets [...]



    60. Posted by 17 Great Posts on Blog Marketing | Webmaster 9 on July 7th, 2009 at 7:32 am

  60. [...] (thanks jeremiah for the tip) AKPC_IDS += “213,”;Popularity: 3% [...]



    61. Posted by i don’t need you | maximum potential on July 27th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
« Older Comments

Leave a Reply

Or enter your details below:




site design by studionashvegas proudly powered by WordPress