Lessons from Twitter on how to quote tweet wisely
If you’ve ever used Twitter on your smartphone, you will be aware of the ‘quote tweet’ functionality. ‘Quote tweet’ essentially allows you to cite another user’s tweet but send it to your followers as ‘you’, for example:
‘Quote tweet’ is great when you’re short of ideas. And you can secure yourself some retweets as a result. Quoting tweets can be alluring but it’s very easy to fall prey to sending the wrong message when the tweets you quote contain links to external content and if you haven’t read the content itself.
Great headlines do not equal great content
The first thing to remember when quote tweeting or retweeting links to content is that great headlines can often be misleading. Great headline writers are not always great content writers. In fact, headlines are often not even written by humans.
Services such as Topical Brainstorm, for example, can generate a pretty good headline for you. Somebody still has to generate the content, though. There’s always a risk that articles behind great headlines will be:
- Too short to be worth sharing
- Full of obvious or cliché statements
- Poorly written
- Full of spelling mistakes and typos
- Full of factual inaccuracies
Sounds very negative but it’s a possibility.
What you quote is what you are?
Another drawback of blind-quoting tweets is that the content behind the links could have been written by followers of the church of the flying spaghetti monster whose philosophy might differ from that of your brand. To avoid this, read the content and ask yourself these questions:
- Who is the person/organisation that wrote this?
- Are they an authoritative voice in the sector?
- Do they add value to their audience’s experience?
- Can you identify with them and would you be happy for your audience to link you with them?
Comment instead of blind-quoting
If you want to avoid the pitfalls of quoting tweets, open the link, read the content and link to it with a comment that comes from you.
Your followers will appreciate that far more.