If you’re into Twitter for business, then you are into word-of-mouth marketing. You should look for people who retweet a lot and start retweeting them. Anything else is a waste of time in my opinion. Of course, companies use Twitter as a tool for customer support or relationship management but Twitter’s unique capability is in empowering promotion.

Retweet as indicator of social behavior

Since Twitter is a social media, it is expected from its users to be sociable. Now, what would be considered socializing on Twitter? I would answer this question by asking another question: what is the point with having followers or following others?

It becomes obvious from this question that the role of followers in Twitter is to perform word-of-mouth for the person they are following. So following someone on Twitter is one way of saying: “I like your stuff, i’ll let people know about it”. Now this ‘I’ll let people know about it’ part is achieved through a particular feature on Twitter: retweeting.

From here, it social practice for professional users to retweet each other out of necessity. If two marketers are mutual friends and that they roughly have the same number of followers, they will be better of retweeting each other since each will benefit from the followers of the other.

The importance of having lots of followers

This is why it is so important to have a lot of followers on Twitter. By having a lot of followers, you have a higher reach and more people are likely going to retweet you. As a result, for the same effort required to write a tweet, you will have better return.

However, there is another indicator of value for your followers: they should be retweeting a lot. If you have the choice between 1000 followers who retweet 1% of your tweets in average, or 100 followers who retweet 15% of your tweets, which one are you to choose? I bet you’ll take the 100 followers who retweet more frequently.