#SMsceptic: How To Get More RTs (The Copycat Way)

Published on

This post’s been drafted since February and I’ve been reluctant to publish it, but after reading Cracked.com’s The 5 Most Notorious Joke Thieves on the Internet and particularly #4, I thought “ahh what the heck….”

4 Steps to RT Success!

Step 1
Find a popular tweet of the moment, usually an image or joke that’s getting shared like nobody’s business.

Hipster birds imageStep 2
Put a spin on it. Make it slightly different. Or if you want to be a right git, don’t even bother changing it – copy and paste it as-is.

Step 3
Tweet it in your own right. Don’t RT the source (in the old RT/quote style or otherwise) – just pass it off as your own.

Step 4
Watch the RTs roll in.

Example

Did you see that “R.I.P. Journalism” tweet (about Katy Perry unfollowing Russell Brand on Twitter) that made the rounds a while back?

Here’s the earliest tweet I could find from January 2012:

So were all of these really necessary?

Why couldn’t they just RT the original (or the first one who shared a pic)?

Grr!

I’ve seen this happen more times than I can stand. It’s not cool. It’s not clever. It’s just annoying.

Angry tweet imageRT the source. Don’t be a plagiarist, not even on a small (tweet-sized) scale.

If you want to share something, RT it, whether it’s the new style or one of the more traditional styles (“RT”, quote-marks, “via”, etc.). Credit the author. Credit the source. Don’t pass it off as your own. Even if that’s not your intention, it could still be how people see it.

Sorry…! Rant over. Just does my head in.

[“tweet tweet” image credit: cobalt123]

1 Comment

Post a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.