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Retweet with Link

Twitter users are familiar with retweet. A tweet is a 140-character-or-less text which is supposed to be an answer to the question "What are you doing?". Twitterers compose these texts and publish them in Twitter. Anybody can read those short texts. As a Twitterer you either compose text like that or follow other Twitterers to read their texts. Because the short text is like a short burst of words people tend to refer to it as 'tweet' which matches the sound of Twitter that purposely carry a bird in the logo.

A retweet is a copy of somebody else tweet. You should acknowledge the author of the original tweet in your retweet. This is done by starting the retweet with 'RT @author:'. Replace 'author' with the Twitter handle of the author of the original tweet. Supposed that @chelahmy tweets "Heavy rain in Kuala Lumpur. S.M.A.R.T. tunnel is expected to be closed". @chelahmy is a Twitter handle. If you want to retweet @chelahmy then you should write "RT @chelahmy: Heavy rain in Kuala Lumpur. S.M.A.R.T. tunnel is expected to be closed".

Every Twitterer wants his or her tweet to be retweeted. A retweet will cause a tweet to be read by more people. When you tweet only your followers will read it. When your tweet is retweeted then the followers of the person who retweet will also read your tweet. You as a person will also get more exposure because your Twitter handle appears in every retweet. The more retweet you get the more people read your tweet and the more people know about you. Getting more people to read your tweet is the game in Twitter.

We are actually doing a favor to the author of a tweet when we retweet. Thus, come along this concept of retweet with link. Why not we append our own link to a retweet so that we will also get some benefit. It is a win-win situation. The original author of the tweet get a favor and we will also get a benefit. We will be delighted to retweet more and the original author will get more favors. However, we must differentiate a retweet with link and the normal retweet. My suggestion is that we start a retweet with link with 'RTL' and append our link at the end of the retweet. The example retweet above will become "RTL @chelahmy: Heavy rain in Kuala Lumpur. S.M.A.R.T. tunnel is expected to be closed http://bit.ly/PJbDF".

When people see the initial 'RTL' they will learn that the link at the end is not part of the original tweet. Well, some people will be curious to click on the link. The author of the original tweet may be eager to click on the link because it is appended to his or her tweet. This will enhance communication in Twitter. Caution: As a reweeter with link we should only do it when our link has at least something to do with the original tweet. Otherwise, the link will resemble a spam.

Regarding the link, we should place a disclaimer at the top of the landing page so that people will understand that the content of the page has nothing to do with the original tweet. Click here for an example.

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