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How Twitter's New Potential 'Retweet With Comment' Feature Could Help Businesses

This article is more than 9 years old.

The recent news that Twitter is testing out a new feature is exciting to some of the site’s most loyal users. The feature would enable a “retweet with comment” option not currently available on the site. Today, Twitter users are only given the option to retweet an item. Adding comments is a time-consuming maneuver that only dedicated users really use.

But the copy-and-paste awkwardness of the current method isn’t the only reason Twitter is making the change. Many users have found they can’t squeeze in the comment they really want to make because of the site’s 140-word character limitation. Unless the original post was extremely short, they’re usually only able to insert a one- or two-word comment, at best. Through the new system, the original post would appear as a Twitter Card beneath their own commentary, rather than appearing as part of the tweet itself.

The benefit to users of this new functionality is clear, but how can businesses use this functionality to their advantage for marketing or branding purposes?

What is a Twitter Card?

Currently used by developers to drive users to their websites for lead generation purposes, a Twitter Card appears as a video or image directly beneath the tweet. The process of getting a Twitter Card to work involves several steps, as I outlined in my article “The Definitive Guide to Using Twitter Cards,” but the tweet-with-comment functionality will be built into Twitter’s existing intuitive functionality. Once implemented, users will see “retweet with comment” as an option, allowing them to write a full tweet in response to the retweeted content.

The experimental change has brought backlash from some users who have seen it during the testing phase. Right now, Twitter is still testing the feature with a select group of users, and Business Insider pointed out that the site continually experiments with features that never come to fruition. However, this particular feature could have significant benefits to businesses trying to build their brand through social media marketing on Twitter.

How the New Feature Would Improve Twitter

Twitter is at its best when it serves as a forum for conversation. Freeing up users to post more words with retweets would open up levels of communication not previously available on Twitter. For example, if an industry expert published some great tips on how to acquire more Twitter followers, users’ retweets of the link to that post could include more thorough comments or responses to the content from the post. Their followers, in turn, could add their thoughts to the conversation, creating a global chat in which each user could discuss the article much more thoroughly and easily than is currently available.

In this sense, tweeting with comments can broaden the potential for creating a larger, more engaged community.

How the New Feature Would Benefit Businesses

As with all social media marketing channels, the real benefit of Twitter for businesses is in the potential to create an engage with a community, which helps build brand awareness, reach, and authority. In addition, Twitter offers an easy way to connect with other industry influencers and build relationships with them. Engaging in thoughtful conversations on Twitter is the best way to build relationships through the site, which is why the new functionality would improve branding and strategic relationship-building potential for businesses.

These new changes would open up additional opportunities for brands to join relevant conversations among their target audience, too. Brands would easily be able to see a conversation in progress between a group of people, and join in. While that sort of observation and participation can occur now, the new “retweet with comments” feature would make it easier and less disruptive for brands to join in on the conversation, minimizing the need to copy/paste, and reducing confusion about what tweets or content are being referenced.

This sort of brand engagement facilitation would dramatically help with brand humanization, which is critical for building brand loyalty, trust, and boosting conversion rates.

Current Workarounds

There are currently a few workarounds to achieving a similar effect to what Twitter is proposing with its new feature, but they aren’t widely known or used. TwitLonger is one tool that can be used to squeeze in in-depth comments. Another workaround method is to retweet the item, then reply to your retweet with your own comments directly to the people involved. Favoriting tweets is also a great way to show your support without bombarding your own followers with retweets.

Twitter’s Emphasis on Conversation

While this new feature may or may not eventually come to fruition, Twitter has taken other measures to make it easier for users to follow a discussion in progress. Conversation view puts a tweet and all of its replies together to make it easier for a user’s followers to see the context of a tweet. Steps like these show that Twitter acknowledges the value of its platform as a forum for engaging conversation.

Conclusion

We’ll see if Twitter decides to roll out the feature for all users. If so, some exciting benefits are in store for not only Twitter’s users, but also brands looking to build authority and community with their social media marketing campaigns.

For more tips on using Twitter for your business, I recommend these articles:

What do you think about the new potential feature? Would you use it? Leave a comment and let us know!