Make your blog go viral with Twitter ReTweets

Retweet or RT is when someone takes your Twitter message and tweets that same message to all followers in their own Twitter network. Getting readers to retweet your content allows the power of your network to take over and spread your message in the Twittersphere. In other words: viral marketing.

This article will focus on how to encourage your readers to retweet your content.

Word of mouth or viral marketing is when your content is spread from person to person. Retweeting is the most powerful factor in something going viral on Twitter. It helps spread your message from one community to the next and has the ability to spread messages much faster than any other viral marketing tool.

It is free advertising and bloggers should do anything they can to encourage readers to retweet their content. Following steps can be taken to get more readers to tweet your content.

Announce your latest blog post

• Always make sure to announce your latest blog posts in a tweet, as that will make it easy for someone just to click on “retweet” button and retweet your post to their own network. This was my tweet about my most recent blog post:

Top 5 Twitter plugins to incorporate into your blog – Latest post – http://twurl.nl/pa3jl5

Make it easy for your readers to share

• Remind your readers about Twitter in your blog posts and make it easy for them to share your blog post on Twitter. You can use one of the Twitter plugins for this or you can create a simple link yourself. Use the following HTML link in your post:

http://twitter.com/home?status=

Put your tweet text after the equals sign. Remember to replace each space with “%20″.

When a reader clicks this link, it will forward him/her to the Twitter home page with the  “What are you doing?” text box pre-filled with your message. Click this finished link to tweet the before mentioned tweet.

This can now be done automatically with Tweet This blog plugin or with a manual edit of your WordPress theme.

Start a Twitter competition

• Both Shoemoney and John Chow have just started Twitter competitions, where to enter a chance to win some prizes, you must retweet a message they have chosen. Looking at my own Twitter stream and searching the Twittersphere, it seems to be a very efficient way to spread your message and your link.

Be active on Twitter

• Spend time on Twitter. The more active you are and more followers you have, more exposure your tweets will get and a higher chance there will be that someone will retweet your content.

Build relationships

• You will never go wrong by talking to your target audience, other bloggers, and other power users on Twitter. By building relationships with people interested in your subject, you stand a better chance of getting your messages retweeted.

Write quality content

• When someone retweets your tweet or your content it shows a high degree of content approval. Your tweet and your content was of such great quality and was so valuable to the person, that they decided to share it with their own Twitter network.

You must have useful, original and quality content. It is impossible to attract people to read your articles, if your articles are not useful. The same way, it is hard to get anyone to spread your link and retweet your message, if they do not enjoy and find your content valuable.

How do I track my retweets?

• Simple! Use Twitter Search and search for the URL you have tweeted in your original tweet. This will show you all the retweets that used the same URL. Look at the number of followers for each person that has retweeted your link to get the number of the total exposure.

To get even more informations about your retweets, use service like TweetBurner to shorten the URL’s in your tweet, as it tracks how many clicks your URL gets.

Twitter Marketing E-Book

For much more information on Twitter, check out my “Twitter Marketing E-book: How to go viral on Twitter“. The e-book includes all the tips on how I use Twitter to build my authority, drive traffic to my blog and get customers. Enjoy twittering!

Image by Ray Lopez.