Excuse me! That's my tweet!

I’m not trying to be controversial with this post - promise! I just wanted to put something out there for people to think about.

I am always VERY grateful to anybody that takes the time to re-tweet one of my tweets and help spread the SAS word! Re-tweets are an integral part of Twitter and they help you find new people to follow and are a great way to show support to people who you engage with on a regular basis.

The only little niggle I have, OK big niggle I have is when someone uses an app (I believe Hootsuite is the main culprit) and they re-tweet my tweet so it shows up as “RT @SAS_Stacey…(TWEET)…..” with their profile pic next to it.

Now, please don’t think it me being precious about my picture it’s more to do with the fact how it may be read by other tweeps, especially those new to Twitter.

Lots of the people I’ve introduced to Twitter have asked what it means and get confused by the layout as they think it’s a tweet from the person with their picture next to it – they don’t understand it’s an app and that tweet actually came from someone else.

It’s even harder to explain when the tweet gets cut off and the last part of the tweet or more importantly any links are lost. I write my auto tweets/tweets specifically to get the most out of the 140 characters so it’s a little disheartening when they get cropped.

The last thing to think about using this method of re-tweet, is how it will look on your account feed. Take a look a mine for example:

There is varied mix of my tweets and those that I’ve re-tweeted so you can see a variety of profile pics. When you use the RT@..... method your account feed will only show your picture and at first glance people may think you’re just all talk, so it may be losing you potential followers; especially if new users are looking at your account and don’t understand how to read the tweets in your feed.

I know no one is doing it intentionally, I expect the majority of people don’t even realise they’re doing it! It’s just something to think about when you hit that ‘re-tweet’ button. 

The only time I think this works is when you do a 'quote' to add a comment or something to the tweet; this is engagement and what Twitter is all about.

Regardless of what method of re-tweet you use though, I’ll always thank you as I’m always very appreciative :)

Oh, one last thing – please don’t think I don’t like Hootsuite, I LOVE it! I use it for setting all my auto tweets – but that’s it. I don’t use it for my interactions, the main Twitter desktop version is my usual tweeting perch! ;)