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You tweet my back, I'll tweet yours

One of the mysteries of using Twitter is how a particular tweet gets spread to the world. I might have got all excited when my tweet about seeing Loki on the underground was re-tweeted over 1,500 times, but a typical tweet of mine probably only merits a handful of retweets.

There is a way round this. A site called CoPromote offers a service where you indicate a tweet you want to boost and others retweet it. Why should they? Because this earns them points that enable them to put up their own tweets for retweeting. (It also works for Facebook pages, but I'm less convinced by the value there.)

Assuming that being retweeted is a good thing, this doesn't seem a bad idea (I'll come back to whether or not it is). It's not like paying for fake followers (apart from anything else, a basic account is free), and it should get your tweets wider visibility. At the moment, the system has two problems. One is that the tweets offered to be retweeted are usually heavily self-promoting, so not the sort of thing you want to retweet. And secondly, even if you can find something worth retweeting, there is no opportunity to modify it to put your own stamp on it, so it's difficult to give it your 'voice'.

I think it's also worth revisiting that assumption. Is being retweeted a good thing? I think it is, but not as much as people think. It means your tweet gets seen by a wider audience - which in the end is part of why we use Twitter - there's a chance for a wider conversation - because Twitter is two-way - and a very small number of people might follow you who otherwise wouldn't. But it's not exactly transformational.

I think I will continue to play with CoPromote - but I'm not yet 100 per cent convinced of its merits... oh, and if you don't follow me on Twitter - feel free to click the follow button on the Twitter thingy in the right hand column! I'd love to connect.
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Comments

  1. Sabine Hossenfelder8 April 2015 at 11:39

    Interesting. I had a look at this. Can't see any of your posts to 'share' though.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brian Clegg8 April 2015 at 12:27

      There should be a couple in there under Science/Technology, though I’ve almost run out of shares. You sometimes have to click for ‘More’ to get to particular ones, and they could have an algorithm that doesn’t show every post to ever person...

      Delete

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