![[365-289] Mr Fry](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3613/3393406996_3e94c78b0f_m.jpg)
photo credit: adotjdotsmith
One of the things I cover in the TweetMentor course, and one of the most overlooked things on Twitter (in my opinion) is the power of the Retweet.
The Retweet is an all round good thing in so many ways – I’m not going to go into them all here, but just point you to Retweetist before giving you an example.
Last night I published a short blog about the fact that Twitter had banned @TweepMe and why I agreed. It was one of many such blogs out there. Don’t tell anyone, but it wasn’t even the best….
But after lounging along with a couple of hundred views, all of a sudden I checked my stats to find that 2500 people were on the site right at that very moment!
2500! Business on Twitter is a tiny blog – we’re lucky if we get that many a day in most cases. By midnight last night we’d had over 6,000. By luchtime today over 12,000 today alone. And people were following me in droves! (Well, droves for me – I’m no Twilebrity!).
We’re still going strong this afternoon and I haven’t seen less than 500 people on the site at the same time any time I’ve checked.
Why? Because Celebrity Tweeter extraordinaire, Stephen Fry, saw fit to Tweet about my post. Just a casual Tweet before he signed off for the evening:
http://twitter.com/stephenfry/statuses/1345128084
Now, I’l grant you, it’s not a Retweet in the real sense of the word (ie I wasn’t credited by name and he didn’t use ‘RT’) on there, but I want to tell you how it happened.
… Because I asked.
That’s right – I sent him a message asking him to let people know.
And he did.
Now before you all rush off and start asking celebrities to retweet your posts, think about WHY he did.
He doesn’t know me, has never spoken to me, and is never likely to again. But:
- It was about an issue relevant to Twitter, which he is very interested in
- It was a scam, which he felt he should let his followers know about
In short – it had relevance. If I’d have asked him to Tweet about my dog, or my charity event or whatever, then he probably wouldn’t. But by knowing more about him and reading about his likes and dislikes, I knew he was an ideal person to get the message out. And for that I thank him 
Because of him, 300,000 people potentially saw that Tweet (or will in future). More than likely 299,990 of them people who had never heard of me or this site. My reach is 2500 or so followers. He has increased that dramatically.
And that’s why retweeting is important. If someone retweets your post, they reach a whole new audience. Of course, it may not be as dramatic as the example above, but it help get the word around.
And sometimes, all you have to do is ask
That is an amazing story. I take it that if someone RT’s one of your tweets, then your message goes out on their timeline, which could, as in this case, be shown to hundreds of thousands of people. Nice one.
However… @stephenfry has also taken down quite a few websites – I suggested @stephenfry ‘d was the new slashdotted
Thats a great story about the power of twitter. I know TweetMentor will be brilliant
It’s certainly true that a humble RT or mention from any name on Twitter can generate a significant amount of traffic instantly. @jessenewhart wrote about this in his blog a little while ago, how a mention from @mashable had made a massive difference to his visitors (he termed it ‘the Mashable effect’).
I’ve seen similar bumps in traffic myself from such mentions and it’s a big part of why it’s important to engage and socialise in Twitter. And while in your example Fry’s tweet would have had an initial massive effect, it’s all the RTs that he himself gets (about your link) that really get the old ripple-effect motoring.
I found this post from a retweet – it works!