In praise of manual RTs

Every now and again there are tiny discussions on Twitter about how dreadful manual RTs are, as if they are 'stealing' someone's content and repackaging it as one's own. I've no truck with this notion myself because a manual RT includes the name of the person who sent it (if it's a 'naked' tweet then yes, that's stealing) and the person is notified in their mentions / notifications.

A manual RT is one where you see RT, MT or via in front of the original senders's name (RT = retweet, MT = modified tweet, where it's amended to fit the space). Usually a comment is added (these are sometimes known as comment RTs) - and if it isn't I'd be more in agreement with the complainers (but there are *exceptions, see below).

On Echofon for iPhone you get the option to 'retweet' (that's the automatic one) or 'retweet with comment' whereas on desktop Twitter.com the button lets you do automatic tweets only. To manually RT you need to copy and paste the tweet into a 'compose new tweet' edit-space and prune to fit / add commentary.

For a long time this was the only way to retweet as Twitter was a bit slow in bringing in the automatic RT function. 

Pros of manual RTs

• The most useful aspect of a manual RT is that it's a quick way of trapping that text in your timeline - if the original is deleted you still have your copy. You can find the content easily later (it's in your own archive) and don't have to remember the name of the person who sent it - there are lots of better ways of permanently trapping a tweet though.
• If the tweet has a URL in it you may be able to get an idea of how often it's been clicked (I'm honestly not sure about this though and don't know what click number is being given in Twitter Analytics) - no, the new Twitter Analytics appears to tell you only about your tweet not how often the link's been clicked overall (the previous version did show this).
• You can add a comment, hopefully pithy and useful
• If the tweet was automatically RTed into your timeline you can add back the name of the person who brought it to you. I always feel that with automatic RTs this aspect is missed out which is a shame because that is information about 'the network'. If someone regularly sends fascinating stuff into my timeline and I automatically RT it I think it's denying anyone seeing my RT from knowing that there's someone else they might like to follow as well. Sometimes people send a separate tweet 'that tweet via @XYZ) which is clunky but if it can be done in the manual RT so much the better). 
• You can pin it to your new timeline, if you like that sort of thing. You can't pin other people's tweets (fair enough they're not yours to pin) but if you manually RT them they become 'as from your timeline' and you can pin to your heart's content.

Cons

• It seems to irritate some people, although that might be a Pro depending on who's being annoyed ;)
• It makes it harder to see how 'well' a particular tweet did since each tweet carries with it its number of automatic RTs and favourites.
• If someone has switched off RTs for your account (say you auto-RT a lot of stuff) then this bypasses that and may irritate them, though this may also be a pro as well depending on the circumstances.

Neither pros nor cons
Since Twitter notifies you anyway if someone else retweets your retweet, or a tweet you were mentioned in it makes not a whit of difference to your knowledge of how that tweet is being shared. It does make a difference to the RT-count on your own tweet (if you were the one who sent it) so if you're doing metrics on a tweet campaign you may need to count other stuff too, if you must :)

//Yes you can send links in DMs
While I'm at it, I still see a lot of people wondering about this. The trick is to send plain text, not hyperlinked URLs. Twitter automatically recognises anything URL-like (http://www.google.co.uk) as something to turn into a clickable blue link (http://www.google.co.uk) and it rejects the majority of these in DM messages, purportedly to reduce click-spam phishing attacks). All you need to do is tweak the URL to stop Twitter from recognising it as an URL.

Strategies such as adding non-URL characters, eg ^^ somewhere in the middle work fine (the recipient needs to know how to 'mend' the deliberately broken URL though) or you could put something at the front of the http:// eg Xhttp:// (Twitter still recognises text strings as addresses even with the htt... protocol bit removed).  See tip 2 in Some Twitter tips, not exhaustive but probably useful. 

The links for retweets still work even though they seem hidden

Alas, with NEW NEW TWITTER now rolled out for most people (everyone?) these links no longer work and resolve to the Twitter / Interactions page. Favstar still works perfectly though, I recommend using that. I've done a strikethrough on the text below, keeping it there for historic reasons though.

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I am now convinced that 2011 is the year that social media went a bit crap. I've been muttering about Google and Twitter (and especially Google AND Twitter when they stopped the fantastically useful Google Realtime) for a few months now and I think an earlier tweet by @Evil_Dumbledore expressing the opinion that Twitter's new look is like people who have facial surgery in the hopes of looking better but end up looking worse is about right. 

Don't get me started on the changes to their terms and conditions which made the easy exporting of tweets a distant memory.

Anyway - I didn't properly shut down my computer last night so I still had the option to capture the links for the three items in the Retweets column. I've checked each and they appear to work (no guarantee that they'll work in future though) so here they are if you want to access just the RTs themselves, without all the @mention nonsense.

Retweets by others: https://twitter.com/#!/retweets_by_others

Retweets by you: https://twitter.com/#!/retweets

Your tweets, retweeted: https://twitter.com/#!/retweeted_of_mine

Twitter's done this before (hidden the pointers that used to go to links), most notably with RSS - there used to be a small RSS icon at the bottom of most pages but that disappeared earlier this year. I trapped the URLs for those too before being migrated permanently to 'New Twitter' and you can find them by searching for RSS here - again no guarantee that RSS feeds will be available from Twitter in future. Bastards ;)

Edit: 11 November 2011

@carolinepennock spotted that if you remove the #! from the tweet then you can call up a page where you'll see the old tabs. I've represented this visually below :-)

Retweets by Others | Retweets by you | Your tweets, Retweeted - the middle one doesn't work, it just resolves to the new #! version.

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I also highly recommend Favstar as a tool for seeing all sorts of information about your tweets and those of others in terms of what's been retweeted and favourited. As always you get a bit more if you authorise it and log in via Twitter.

Tweets of mine that were recently retweeted (just replace my name with yours to see yours):

http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/recent

• Most retweeted: http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/most_retweeted
• Most favorited*: http://favstar.fm/users/JoBrodie/most_favorited

*sounds a bit biblical doesn't it...

While I'm having a moan Twitter appears to have killed off Blackbird Pie which let you plug in a tweet URL, eg https://twitter.com/#!/TeamJanetUK/status/134703908445622272 (a fellow warrior in the fight to get RTs reinstated as their own button) and get a bit of code to embed in your blog - enabling you to embed tweets on an ad hoc basis. It's still perfectly possible to embed tweets but it's just that bit faffier. Stop it.