An Argument for Why Retweets Beat Out Likes, Plusses & Check-ins

Twitter retweets can be more powerful than Facebook Likes or other forms of social media promotion

Social media has gotten a lot of buzz lately with Facebook’s IPO. For businesses extending their marketing efforts into the social media foray, having a Facebook presence seems logical. However, the site, which is almost a billion strong, does have its drawbacks. Namely, the only people who can see the famous Facebook Likes are limited as is real time engagement with followers. A retweet with Twitter, on the other hand, carries different weight and may send a better message overall, according to Business2Community.com.

How Twitter gets around the “friends only” barrier

The reach of your Facebook friends networks can be limited by the settings of each person in the network, meaning that if one of your followers opts for strict settings, only the people inside his network can see his posts. Twitter has fewer of these limits, so your retweet is likely to be seen by more people and retweeted more often to people outside your network.

The other hidden advantage of the retweet

Twitter has a feature that has moved into the Facebook realm as well as some of the other social media sites but really has limited use outside of Twitter. It’s the hashtag. This little feature gives extended life to a retweet and helps people find you.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to build buzz for your firm’s auto accident lawyers. To do this, you write an article about it on your firm’s blog and post a link to the blog post on Twitter. Include a hashtag with the Twitter post such as #autoaccidentlawyers or #autoaccident #lawyers. You can even throw in a geographic location to create a long-tail keyword phrase hashtag. People searching for these tags will find you. If your tag also has a retweet, it’s like an extra acknowledgment that the article or website link you posted is worth reading and worth sharing with others. This often leads to more clickthroughs and more social engagement.

Final thoughts on retweets

At the end of the day, social media is about social engagement. Twitter gives you the ability to interact with your followers in real time unlike sites like Google Plus, Facebook or Check ins. This means you can carry on conversations with them. The nice thing about this is that you’ll see right away that one of your followers retweeted you. Since it’s good Twitter etiquette to acknowledge when someone retweets you or mentions your name, you also encourage more sharing and more engaged traffic in the long run.

Social Media Mondays is a CaseDetails.com series covering different topics in the social media world on a weekly basis. Check back every Monday for more news on social media and useful information on how law firms can use social platforms to their advantage.