One of the first things that really confused the heck out of me when I first started on Twitter was the stream of RTs I saw on my homepage. I couldn’t figure out what on earth RT stood for. As a fan of Richard Thompson, the only thing that came to mind was that everyone on Twitter is a massive Richard Thompson fan, but then the tweets didn’t seem to be about him, so eventually I abandoned that idea. Only after some careful research did I find out that RT stood for retweet.
Once I knew what RT stood for, I tried to figure out how people used this whole retweet function. Like a lot of people, I noticed that under every tweet there was a “retweet” button. If you clicked “retweet,” you’d share that post with all of your followers while giving credit to the person who said it. Pretty interesting concept. However, what I know now, and what we’re going to talk about today, is that retweeting can be much more than simply clicking a button. It can be an engagement tool.
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I first started blogging in June 2009. I remember that first post being so nervous to write it and read it over so many times to be sure it was free of spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors and what I really wanted to say. I wanted to look smart, knowledgeable and most of all something I could be proud of putting my name on for the entire world to see. I wrote the second, third and all the way up to the seventh one before I hit post for any of them. I did not want only one post up there as it was screaming newbie (like 7 posts was not but it made perfect sense to me). Four of them were list posts as I read that list posts perform really well and yes they did. It was amazing. I was averaging 75 reads per article … I was floating on air and was determined to get to that first 100 readers.
During the Spring of my junior year in high school, I applied to a local craft store. I needed money (what high schooler doesn’t?), I loved crafting, I loved the idea of a discount on my crafting supplies, and I knew I could do a good job. After all, I had played store from the time I was a kid. As luck would have it, I got the job after 1 interview. The primary lesson I learned during that time is that people really need to make sure they have a censor button. In the new online era, this lesson is more vital than ever.
It’s been awhile since I took some time out to highlight what some of the fantastic people in my community are up to. In fact, so many of them are doing amazing things that I thought I would go ahead and create a category, because I foresee a lot of these posts in the coming months and years 🙂
It occurred to me as I was sketching out this series that a few of you might actually want to know how to disengage from people, or how to engage under less pleasant circumstances than what I generally will be talking about for the next couple of months. Since I’m a giver, I wanted to make sure you would feel the love, so this post is dedicated especially to you! For those of you who still want to learn more about how to engage successfully on Social Media sites, just take the opposite of a lot of these concepts and roll with them. It should still work just fine for you.