Sunday, April 12, 2015

Twitter Introduces Retweet with Comments

I'm a little late to the party with this one, but I am delighted to report that Twitter has introduced a new feature that allows you to retweet a tweet AND comment using ALL 140 characters. Social media managers, rejoice! Speaking from personal experience, I can't count how many times I wanted to provide meaningful commentary to a retweet, but was instead left having to truncate my message due to the length of the original tweet. Like any new feature, it is being met with marginal satisfaction- but it certainly appears to be a step in the right direction towards creating a better, more user friendly Twitter.

In order to use the new feature, users click the retweet button on the tweet that they want to appear on their newsfeed. After this button is pressed, a dialogue box appears with an option to input a comment. This is where users can add their 2-cents to the tweet using 140 characters or less. After it is posted, it appears on a user's newsfeed as a tweet within a tweet (the comment tweet being the primary tweet and the retweet being the embedded tweet). In simpler terms: the retweet appears within the tweet in a similar fashion to how a photo appears within a tweet.

Overall, I am excited to begin using this feature and think that it will make social media managers jobs far easier. Now, if we could just get a nice "edit" option similar to what Facebook has, we'd be in social media heaven.. (but maybe that's just wishful thinking).

For more on the new feature, here's the Daily Mail's take.

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