Written by Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Twitter Marketing Expert

Retweeting other people’s tweets on Twitter can be a powerful marketing strategy:

•    You can share with your followers valuable info from others

•    The people you re-tweet will be grateful that you repeated their message and gave them credit for the message.

And, of course, when it comes time for you to ask for a retweet of a specific tweet of yours, it is more likely that people will retweet you if they know that you are generous with retweeting others.

Now let’s clarify a couple of points of retweeting on Twitter:

•    If you want someone to retweet you because you feel your particular tweet is very valuable (do NOT do this with every one of your tweets), you can add “Please RT” or “Pls RT” at the end of your tweet.

•    If you see that at the end of someone’s tweet, and you want to oblige, you do NOT just copy and paste the wording of the tweet and send it out as if it were your original tweet.  YOU MUST CREDIT the original tweet in one of two ways.

The two ways to credit a tweet when you are retweeting:

•    Let’s say I’m retweeting something that @MillerMosaicLLC tweeted.  I would start my retweet:

RT @MillerMosaicLLC and then add the wording of her tweet.

•    Other people sometimes do it this way — they first put the wording of someone’s tweet and then add “via @ZimblerMiller” as the credit attribution.

•    Of course there are variations.  You may see someone who begins a tweet:

RT @MillerMosiacLLC @ZimblerMiller – this usually means retweeting @MillerMosaicLLC who retweeted @ZimblerMiller.  (I say usually because not everyone on Twitter follows the same retweeting conventions.)

How to retweet someone’s tweet:

Now if you want to retweet someone’s tweet you can do so manually by typing “RT @username” and then copying and pasting the tweet into your status update box.

Or you can do this an easier way by using a retweet function.  For example, you may choose to use the official Twitter retweet function:

You find this by hovering over the right-hand side of a tweet until you see the “retweet” icon.  If you click on this you’ll get the question “Retweet to your followers?”

And if you click “yes” you’ll have just sent out a tweet with the photo of the person who originally tweeted and with that person’s username rather than your photo and your own username. (Your own username is only in tiny letters at the bottom of the tweet where it says “Retweeted by username.”)

I personally do not use this Twitter automatic retweet function.  Instead I recommend what my business partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) has put on my Twitter account in order for me to easily retweet and still have my photo and username show rather than the photo and username of the person who originally tweeted.

This can only be done if you use the web browser Firefox:

Step 1: Go to http://www.mozilla.com and click on the “Download Firefox – Free” button. Don’t worry about all your saved bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history you had on Internet Explorer.  When you install Firefox, it asks if you want to import all that – click yes to get this all on Firefox.

Step 2: Go to http://budurl.com/gmonkey and click button “Add to Firefox.”  After installing this Greasemonkey addon, Firefox will ask you to restart – do so.

Step 3: Go to http://budurl.com/rtbutton and click “Install” button.  Firefox will then ask you if you’re sure you want to install this Greasemonkey script.  Click “install” again.

One you’ve downloaded the script, go to Twitter.com and you’ll see a straight line on the right-hand side of each tweet in your Twitter stream.  Click on that icon in any tweet to setup a retweet in your status update box.

Now you can edit the retweet before sending it out.  For example, you might add “great post” before retweeting.

This makes it very easy for you to retweet other people’s worthwhile information and get appreciated for sharing with the Twitter community.