Twitter Retweets – Do the Math

On Twitter, the best thing to do if you want to be retweeted is offer up something of value – timely news, a useful or entertaining link, a thought-provoking quote, a fresh idea, or even a good laugh. While there’s no simple formula that leads to retweetage, you can make life easier for those wanting to retweet you by doing a tiny bit of math. Don’t panic – it’s easy!

Twitter allows messages of 140 characters maximum, but when you retweet, you send out all the characters in someone else’s original tweet PLUS the characters in their username and as many as six additional characters – the letters RT at the beginning of the tweet to signal it’s a retweet, an @ sign before the username, a colon after the name (in many clients, though not if you type it manually), and a space after the name or colon. Using me as an example, there are 10 characters in my Twitter ID plus the 6 additional characters above for a total of 16 characters to type “RT @gregpincus: ”. So, if it’s going to use up 16 characters for someone to retweet me, I should cap my own tweet at 124 characters (because 140 – 16 = 124). You can calculate your own perfect “retweet length,” or…

OK, fine, you can skip the math if you want – any tweet of 119 characters or less is safe for anyone. And think about stopping at 100 characters or less, so people can add comments when they retweet you.

Formulas aside, keeping your tweets the right length matters for two reasons. One is that quite often people are in a rush and don’t have time to edit what you’ve written, so they simply might not retweet you if yours is too long. The other is that if your tweet is too long, people might edit it when they rewtweet you and change your words in a way you don’t like… even if that’s not their intent! Sure, that can happen no matter what you write originally, but it’s less likely if folks have no reason to edit to start with.

For a lot of great information about retweeting, check out this presentation by Dan Zarella of HubSpot. Of course, most of what we write on Twitter won’t be retweeted, but if you’re typing up something you think or hope might be… don’t forget to do a little math.