by Jonathan Towell
November 23, 2009
Twitter recently baked in retweet functionality into their core service. Here are the notable changes:
- Retweets now display with the original twit's profile, not the retweeter's profile.
- Twits can just click a button to retweet instead of typing "RT @username"
- Retweets show retweet stats including who else has retweeted the tweet
- The API has a new method to accomodate retweeting programmatically
- The API has a new method that displays all the retweets for a given tweet.
- Twitter now has pages for "Retweets by others", "Retweets by you", and "Your tweets, retweeted"
The net effect of these changes is that great tweets will see the original tweeter credited and thus drive more traffic, followers, and brand awareness to the author. The lesson to marketers is to create value in your tweets because branding on Twitter just got more powerful.
Read a more detailed commentary here.