27 ideas to automate the Retweet
Tips, recommendations and formulas to use
Retweet (RT) is the way to quickly share a tweet of your own or from another account with all your followers, and that otherwise they would not see unless they followed the author’s of the tweet or this would have been shared by some other user’s following.
However, despite the benefits of this mechanism, the abusive or indiscriminate use of retweet automation can lead to a bad experience for your users, which has led Twitter to establish rules for its use:
"Provided you comply with all other rules, you may Retweet or Quote Tweet in an automated manner for entertainment, informational, or novelty purposes. Automated Retweets often lead to negative user experiences, and bulk, aggressive, or spammy Retweeting is a violation of the Twitter Rules."
Twitter Automation Rules
Frequently automating the retweet is applied to a hashtag or keyword, however there are many and better strategies, less aggressive and more useful for your followers. This list of ideas that we have developed jointly with Botize users brings together the automations that are giving better results now and that you can apply too.
Optimize the retweet of hashtags, words or phrases
Identifying the hashtag is only the starting point.
Optimize this by filtering tweets that contain unwanted words, add variants if more than one hashtag is being used online, or use exact phrases instead of words to exclude other contexts and increase precision.
Retweets bounded to a language or city
The same hashtag may be being used for different purposes in different places. Also exclude tweets written in a language other than your audience.
Retweet of content previously selected by you
No one better than you to select the content. You have done the job of ’Like’ each tweet you want to be retweeted, followed the relevant people or grouped them in a list.
Now you can put the autopilot on.
From specific users
A variant of the above type applies in cases where you identify one or more referring users or these deserve sufficient authority.
Manual VS Native
The normalization of the official retweet button has deprecated the manual version of this, now understood as a bad practice that far benefiting the author of the original tweet, detracts from visibility and deprives him of more possible retweets and favorites.
Manual
Retweet
During the beginning of Twitter and in the absence of the retweet, users covered this lack by copying the original tweet and publishing it again by putting the initials RT next to the author’s name.
Native
Retweet
Years later, Twitter implemented the concept of retweet. Today we also call it "Automatic Retweet" and the previous mode is known as "Manual Retweet".
Automated
Retweet
Retweet automation takes on a different meaning and refers to the process of delegating the retweet to an algorithm.
There are still good reasons for manual RT and it has to do with how Twitter treats automatic retweets. These are shown on the user’s timeline only once, regardless of whether other users you follow retweet thereafter.
This feature makes manual RT make sense again in cases where important news is shared that, even though it may end up being shown more than once in the timeline, cannot be a nuisance for the user.
Only recent content
The time factor plays an important role. Retweet only current content. In others cases it may be enough a timely retweet of some of the most recent tweets, not all.
Retweet scheduled in time
Delaying retweet several days is a reminder strategy to consider, just like schedule automatic retweet to run only during event dates.
Only relevant content
Don’t lose control by automating the process.
Retweeting content that is already gaining popularity is a slow but sure move. Let the tweets take precedence before echoing them.
From videos or images
In addition to the keyword in this case the tweet must contain a multimedia element to retweet to occur.
The opinion of the experts
The following list constitutes the main advantages and recommendations that we have extracted from companies that make intensive use of Twitter in their marketing strategies.
Advantages
- Promote services or pieces of contentcheck
- Help yourself with the need to create content on a regular basischeck
- Help your followers discover quality authors and content check
- Simplify content search for less experienced users check
- Attract attention by setting up a series of retweets prior to launching a product check
- Contribute to the increase of "social signals" that Google considers positive for the relevance of your site check
- Add value to your audience with related material from other sources than usual check
- Favors popularization of other Twitter users check
Recommendations
- Avoid use that may be perceived as abusive by Twitter or your followers check
- Users follow you for your content and your retweets should be consistent with it check
- Don’t lose your identity. Retweets should complement your timeline, not cover it check
- Check your automatic retweets frequently and disable those that may no longer be relevant check
- Check and make sure you don’t break Twitter’s automation rules check
Content with links
Sometimes the tweet may not be enough. We want the hashtag to be accompanied by a URL to a certain domain or contains some kind of link.
Content generated around a user
When the important thing is not the objective but who quotes it, the retweet take a different perspective.
Content generated around a topic
User experience matters.
Disseminate from the consumer’s point of view, detecting with positive or negative opinions about a hashtag, product or topic.
In other cases, searching for questions in combination with a hashtag can lead to new conversations and opportunities.