By Lauren MacEwen
LOS ANGELES—Twitter has been going through a lot of changes recently. From bots to security updates. Twitter is keeping everyone on their toes. But one change that has gone a little under the wire is how retweets are affecting your analytics. You might be thinking, who cares? Well if you want to increase your reach, meaning the number of accounts that potentially see your tweets, then you care. If you want to increase your followers and engagement then you care. If you are a trying to make money utilizing Twitter, then you care.
There are two kinds of tweets on Twitter: 1) The retweet. 2) The quoted retweet.
The retweet is simply reposting a tweet someone else posted on twitter. You press the retweet button and hit send. It looks like this:
The quoted retweet is when you retweet but then you say something about it before you retweet. It looks like this:
The retweet looks bigger but otherwise they look about the same. Not quite. If you look at the number of likes and retweets under the first picture you will see that there are 337 likes and 47 retweets. Wow that sounds great! If you look under the quoted retweet you will see there are none. That is because when you do the quoted retweet that retweet is now becoming yours. Though you don’t own the content, you do own the likes, comments and retweets on it. The regular retweet is essentially you showing your followers what someone else has posted. If your followers give it a like or a retweet, that engagement counts towards the original tweeter and not you. You will even notice.
Take a look at this screenshot taken from analytics.twitter.com
On the left you see the quoted retweet, the retweet and then a regular tweet. On the right, from Twitter’s analytics dashboard, you only see the quoted retweet and the regular tweet. The retweet is not there.
If you are a brand and you do a lot of retweets, but you are not quoting the retweet then you are no longer benefiting your analytics. If you are use to doing a lot of regular retweets and you have noticed a decrease in your impressions and engagement, or a slowdown in your follower growth, this could be why.
If you are wondering why Twitter made this change, since it seems so innocuous, it is because of bots. Twitter is trying to cut down on the benefits of Twitter bots. For years there have been retweet bots that all they do is retweet other peoples tweets. Many people have targeted these bots to get into their retweet pool believing that these bots help with overall engagement. This change has now rendered these bots useless.
If you want your Twitter to work for you, then make sure you are doing quality engagement. The simple solution is to comment on all retweets, even if it is a simple emoji. Don’t miss the opportunity to own the Twitter engagement that you are driving.
