Used to be that retweets would just have “RT” as the first few letters, but now some people have these fancy retweets where the original tweet is in a box below their commentary. Nice. How can I do that?
What you’re seeing is a major improvement to the “retweet” (really, it’s the Twitter version of the ‘share’ feature) that Twitter rolled out early in 2015 or so, where instead of your tweet being composed of their message plus whatever word or words you could squeeze in to the message, it’s a completely independent element. What’s nice is that if I have a 150-char tweet and you retweet me, you can add another 150 character long commentary of your own. Far nicer.
And while most of the mobile apps and programs for your Mac or PC should now work with this new capability, turns out that Twitter’s Web interface is super easy to work with and definitely works with the new retweet!
Let’s have a look.
First, here’s Tracy retweeting a message I pushed out on Twitter. Notice how it shows up nicely set off in its own box:
How’d she do that? Magic!
No, just kidding! Here’s a typical tweet in the Web interface at Twitter.com:
Look at the little icons below the message. From the left they’re “reply”, “retweet”, “like” and the three-dot button that brings up a menu of additional choices.
For this example, click on the two-arrow recycle symbol-esque “retweet” button. Here’s what pops up:
What’s key here is that you can add a comment… or not. I’ll show you what happens if you don’t in a second, but for now, let’s add our own two cents:
Notice that the text input box sneakily expands once I start typing. Modern Web. Nice.
Ready to go, I’ll click “Tweet” (notice the “Retweet” button’s label changed once I started typing). The result:
Hey, it’s that snazzy boxed tweet effect! 🙂
If I wouldn’t have added a comment but just clicked the “Retweet” button, btw, here’s what would have happened:
Kind of an old school retweet, but even here it shows “Dave Taylor retweeted”, which is nice.
So that’s the ticket. I almost always use the Web-based interface for Twitter, and find that it works really well, and it’s easy to get to: just go to www.twitter.com.
Oh, and you can find me on Twitter as @DaveTaylor if you’d like to follow me!