So here is the thing about Twitter. ReTweeting, the practise of sharing messages from people you follow to your followers, is a great thing. I ReTweet all the time. If I see something of value, something that I want to share, I am more than happy to click the little ReTweet button in Tweetdeck, and spread the message on. But I have been thinking recently that I might stop doing this. It’s just too easy.
That is not to say that I will no longer spread messages around, far from it. But I am going to change them up a little before sending them. The value I find in a message that I want to share is usually more than the effort to just ReTweet it. If I think a message is sufficiently interesting enough to share, I want to personalize it. If I see nothing but a list of ReTweets in my Twitter stream, I am apt to ignore things. I pay more attention to original messages, and I doubt I am the only one who does. So, any ReTweets from me will no longer be the original message prefaced by the code RT – rather they will be the spirit of the message, but given the attention and care I think it deserves.
This will be a more time consuming process, and I might not be able to share as many messages as I previously had, but I think it will imporve the signal to noise ratio of my Twitter stream. What say you?
