So unless you’ve been living underneath a rock for the last few days, you’ll have heard that Twitter is rolling out its new retweet settings. If not, I really encourage you to read Ev’s post, as it gives a great rundown on the reasons behind the change, and some hints at what will come in the future.
However, one of the things that I personally found most interesting from the post was Ev’s discussion of the “redundancy of tweets”, and how this new format will tackle the problem. Ev states that:
And because they’re trackable, we can take care of the redundancy problem: You will only get the first copy of something retweeted multiple times by people you follow.
Now, I think this will have more of an effect on promotions run through Twitter than most people realise. A bog-standard competition “format” that you often see floating around Twitter is the “Retweet this to go into the draw/win this fantastic prize”. Hardly original, it’s true, but I’d say 80% of the competitions I see run through Twitter have this in their requirements in some form.
With the new retweet format being rolled out, those competitions will hardly be as effective… the brand will get less exposure (instead of being broadcast multiple times, the tweet will only be broadcast once, with attribution to those who have retweeted it below) and it makes me wonder how the virality of certain tweets will be affected.
What do you think?