photo by debh2u

Twitter here, Twitter there, Twitter everywhere. The simplicity of the application along with the portability of the data on the service has allowed Twitter to grow by leaps and bounds. The sharing of 140 character messages in easy and convenient ways has been a great twist for the company itself, as messages from the service are seen by more eyeballs and causes a sticky factor to commence, but also allows for the creator of the message to receive viral promotion of their message.

The terminology behind all of this is the ReTweet.

A ReTweet is simply one Twitter user passing on the message of another and giving credit back to the person that originated the message by placing RT at the start of the message. Here is a quick example:

Jun Tweets: He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk.

I like his Tweet, so I retweet it: RT @junloayza – He who thinks he leads, but has no followers, is only taking a walk.

Now all my followers can see the message that Jun wrote and his message is shared with even more people.

So now that we understand what a ReTweet is, what are some effective ways to have your messages ReTweeted (assuming that you have written a valuable message worth sharing of course)?

TweetMeme

This may be the most popular way for bloggers and readers or blogs to ReTweet a message. They have created a ReTweet button that is easy to install on your website and allows a reader to easily click the button to share the message with their followers. On the Social Media Marketing Blog it looks like this:

Try it yourself at the end of this post!

After clicking the button it will verify the Twitter account you wish to place the Tweet on (by logging into that account). From there you can customize the RT if you need to and hit the ReTweet Button. Wait about a second or two and voila, the post is now in your Twitter stream.

Grab the button and install it here.

Twitter Apps

One of the great ways to experience Twitter is through the use of 3rd party apps. Many of these apps make some of Twitter’s little intricacies very easy to implement and ReTweeting is one of them. We are going to look at TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and HootSuite below.

TweetDeck

In the TweetDeck application, you can easily ReTweet a valuable message by simply clicking on the ReTweet button located on a user’s profile picture as shown below. This action can also be easily done on the TweetDeck iPhone application for mobile ReTweets.

Seesmic Desktop

Much like TweetDeck, the Seesmic ReTweet button is located on the profile picture of the user as you can see below.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a web application (with a nifty new iPhone application) that has some very powerful analytics and tracking behind it. They also have a 1-click option for RT’s and is shown below.

The RT Banner

The next tactic for ReTweeting success is using a static banner and some HTML code to make a custom ReTweet link. These are very popular on static webpages, for videos and for product pages. The idea is to create a banner like the one below and then link that banner with a link code from the Twitter API that looks like this:

a href=”http://twitter.com/home?status=

After the word status you are to write the message that you want displayed in the RT.

http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @g_ro New post on 5 Ways to ReTweet Your Message http://www.link.com

The end result would look something like this:

So Go ReTweet

Now that you know some basic principles and powerful ways to ReTweet, start doing it yourself. The more value you provide your users, the more engaged your audience will be. As will all social media, be cautious of what you ReTweet and be sure it adds value. Just because you can easily ReTweet does NOT mean you should overdue it.

Do you have another way that you like to ReTweet using different applications, strategies or tools? We would love to hear in the comments below.

This post was written by Greg Rollett. Greg blogs about the Internet Lifestyle, music marketing and online strategies.

Tags: hootsuite, retweet, seesmic desktop, tweetdeck, Twitter