Retweets, for those you who are unaware are when someone on twitter essentially forwards on a tweet (a twitter post) that you have tweeted onto their own followers. So I say “the next web rocks”, you may retweet “RT the next web rocks”.
Yesterday, as the Royal Pingdom blog highlights, the weight of these retweets became apparent as one of Pete Cashmore’s tweets sent a site LitmanLive to it’s knees.
Interestingly a site launched earlier this month devoted to tracking these retweets and it’s proved an interesting source for bloggers and avid link sharers alike. You can see a list of the most retweeted users here and check the number of your retweets here – Cashmore is rested firmly at the top.
This undoubtedly proves the weight behind a retweet, but we must also remember the value of the actual link title. For example, Cashmore’s tweet “How to use Twitter to find your next job” was clearly a winner because a) it was Twitter oriented and b) because lets face it, if there’s one thing people are looking for more than average, it’s a j o b.
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This being so, Royal Pingdom are correct to wonder whether Twitter is on the brink of becoming a Digg or StumbleUpon in terms of traffic – I would say no. Why? Well, currently Twitter is a relatively short spike in traffic in comparison to sites like Digg. I believe it’s going to take a site like Retweetist, Twitturls, Twitterbuzz or Twitturly to earn “hit” status before we see the same levels of traffic.
What say you?
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