This week I’ve been happily exploring the new retweet feature on Twitter.com. I can’t wait for this same functionality to spread to my favorite twitter clients. It’s accomplishing a better user experience for many reasons.
- The integrity of the original tweet is saved (if you want to add comments, just send your own tweet)
- You can easily measure how many times a tweet has been Retweeted
- Measurement of overall influence on Twitter can be better calculated
So, why the change? What’s next?
One of the biggest reasons I’m excited for it is the ability to measure overall reach by bringing it back to old school marketing numbers. Number of impressions. Why is that good? For people like me who run a brand twitter account and you get questions like, “what were the numbers on twitter today.” I say things like this, “We had 430 Retweets, and our share of voice on Twitter spiked to .2% (from .05-.1%)”. This probably sounds like klingon to people who don’t use Twitter. Or I can say other things that mean less to me, but probably more to others, “We sent it to our 500,000 followers, I don’t know what they did with it.” With old school marketing numbers you can easily communicate more relevant data to your leadership team, and it makes it easier to validate the need for social media.
(side note: Yes, there are a lot of tools to calculate reach & engagement, but I have yet to find one where I can both fully trust the data and translate it to an normalized number, like impressions.)
It’s a small, but an important step in Twitter’s maturation.
The new Retweet feature is going to allow precise measurement of how people are consuming tweets and what they’re doing with it next.
Now, what is the number one reason Twitter is doing this?
Commercial accounts: Charge for information that isn’t available to anybody else. For example, this tweet went to 520,000 followers. The actual reach of that tweet was 3.73 million (just a guess) because it was Retweeted by these people.
Other reasons:
Can’t wait to see what Twitter, Inc. has in store next.
It’s too bad they don’t let you add any comment to the original tweet.