Hawk's View

In November 2009, Twitter went live with its controversial internal retweet functionality, which allowed uses to quickly share anything published to Twitter with one click of a button. However, this new mechanism didn’t allow any kind of annotation of tweets, which meant that users were unable to amend or add comments to retweets. This is still true today, and this has meant that Twitter’s internal retweet has not been as widely adopted as the company might have liked. Indeed, many influencers and Twitter veterans steadfastly refuse to ever use this kind of retweet. It’s these people you need to be mindful of, as the old-hands of Twitter are often the people who get your tweets out there and in front of the desired eyeballs. But if people have to edit your tweet to make it short enough for them to add their thoughts – or even just to fit in the RT @username part – you will suffer one of two mishaps: either they’ll have to modify your tweet so much that all the good stuff is gone, or they simply will not bother.