Retweet. A Twitter FAIL

If you tweet, you’ll have noticed that Twitter has a new retweet feature where instead of having to copy/paste someone’s tweet and add an ‘RT’ in front of their name, you can just click the little button and it does all that for you.

Sounds great… and many people are using it, only many of those people don’t realize one important factor.

When someone retweets your tweet using that new button, you don’t get notified of it with a comeback in your @ timeline, allowing you to thank the people who are retweeting your tweet and exposing you to their follower list, potentially gaining you some new followers.

I think that’s rude, and so far, it causes twits like me a lot of extra work in opening up another window/tab for Twitter search, searching my own Twitter handle and then having to go through the list of results looking for any retweets I didn’t know about… then tweeting my thanks.

I’ve been tweeting this, hoping to make others aware, but worry perhaps that too, is starting to annoy some. I’ve sent this concern in to the twitter gurus via their feedback, and am sharing it with you too. Perhaps you didn’t realize this? Perhaps you’d also like to ask the folks behind the scenes at Twitter to fix this.

Here is my feedback, verbatim:

The new retweet feature is more convenient to use, but awful. The retweet does not show up in the @ timeline of the person they’ve retweeted, so that person doesn’t know they’ve been retweeted unless they go to twitter search and search their own twitter handle and then go through the list to find any retweets. In other words… the majority of people being retweeted never know it and can’t thank the person who retweeted them. This makes for poor relations with your followers, and because most people don’t realize this… they will simply think we are rude for not tweeting a thanks every now and then.

I think that’s a HORRID oversight. So now, instead of making retweeting easier, which I’m sure was the intent, you’ve made a more onerous task of it because I have to go somewhere else (twitter search) and find all my retweets instead of just viewing my @’s.

Please fix that.

As I tweet to raise awareness, so that people don’t think ME rude for not thanking… other followers are getting annoyed because they don’t realize this and just think I’m being a pest.

Good intentions, but it’s a fail.

I’m sure you are getting good responses too… for the convenience I’m sure, but I question if those people realize this other issue… and if they did, would they still give it a positive review?

 

Don’t get me wrong… I do appreciate, enjoy and love all the benefits of using Twitter. It is a fabulous service, but even those who get it right can have times when they get something wrong. I think this is one of them and if they’re as great as so many of us think… they’ll fix this so that we can all be a little more gracious to the followers who retweet us and help us build our followings. In other words, they’ll retweak the retweet!

So what do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments!