When you are working at a small company or a startup there are new ideas being thrown around every day on how to improve products or services, however often the best or most innovative ideas come from the customers themselves.  In the case of twitter, users began replying to one another by using @username, however this method is tedious and annoying.  In response, twitter took notice and adapted the idea by implementing the “reply” feature.  By adding this, Twitter was able to change their technology into something that more resembles a forum where users can easily share ideas with one another, but also have a two way conversation that anyone could follow or even participate in.  This is a great example of how a smart company took the time to understand their audience and mareke give the people what they want. Retweeting followed a similar path, and although social media management programs had the ability to retweet for some time, this ability was also a late adoption of Twitter.  Tweeting also is a very powerful tool for blogs to help them gain more traction online, however without the ability to retweet within twitter, this became difficult.  Once this became available to anyone who is on Twitter without using a program to manage their account, tweets were able gain traction across the social space at a rate that never existed before.

If you read our earlier posts about how to get more retweets then you already know how to optimize your tweeting for maximum traction, but when ask yourself, how many times am I retweeting?  What or whose tweets am I retweeting?  Why am I retweeting?  Typically, the main reasons someone retweets is that they want to spread tweets to new audiences, to publicly agree or disagree with someone, as an act of friendship, and often times for self gain. The value of a retweet is to spread information that will benefit your followers or help them lean something new, but before you go out and start rewetting everything in hopes that others will do the same, instead focus on spreading good content, and the retweets will follow.