This might be a question for Quora but I'll try here first. If I discover that Company X has done something dreadful I might tweet "I am appalled by the way @CompanyX has behaved in MatterY" and Company X will see this in their @mentions stream.
(a) If 100 people press the RT button I will see that my tweet has been retweeted 100 times, but what notification will @CompanyX get?
(b) If 100 people manually RT my tweet so that it looks like "RT @JoBrodie I am appalled..." then @CompanyX will see 100 of those.
When Tweetdeck for iPhone worked (used happily from June2008-Nov 2011) I had a column for jobrodie (in addition to my mentions). I had this column since ~2008 because I noticed that, at that time, some @mentions didn't get through and I didn't want to miss any. Once I created the column I also noticed that as an added bonus it let me see the (a) type of RT separately from the (b) type.
But this doesn't work anymore and I don't know what CompanyX would need to do in order to see this.
Perhaps I could investigate this on Tweetdeck for desktop computers - but even if that does let me see these 'missing' RTs, do companies know enough about the hidden tweets to be able to find this information?
Quite often there are Twitter campaigns to draw attention to some wrongdoing and these get hundreds of retweets. But does the company concerned get a sense of the strength of feeling if they only get a tip-of-iceberg view of tweets that include their @mention in a manual RT.
Two questions then:
1. Companies know about this problem, yes? (Assuming it is a general problem and not just some glitch I'm experiencing!)
2. What tool do they use to solve it?
It goes without saying that I really don't like the (to me, new) RT style and avoid using it when I can.
Edit: 26 December 2011
Further reading
h/t @EvidenceMatters who pointed me to this excellent post with which I entirely agree :)
Retweet the old fashioned way, using 'classic' or 'traditional' retweets only (7 December 2011) by Ray Beckerman
Tweetdeck for computer definitely shows more stuff than Echofon for iPhone but I suppose I need to find an example of where someone gets lots of RTs of a tweet that mentions me before I can test this out properly ;)
ReplyDeleteOr someone else does and needs to report back.