Do All of Your Followers See Your Retweets? Not if You Use Twitter

19 Nov 2009

Edit: The new TweetDeck (version 0.32) released on 11/30 has added support for the new Twitter RT format.

Let me start out by saying that I’m happy to see Twitter adding more functionality to their own website and I realize that the new retweet function is still in beta.

Now that I have that disclaimer out of the way, let me point out what I consider to be the most glaring flaw in the system and when I say glaring, I mean it’s a much bigger issue than the fact that we can’t add our own comments or that tweets from strangers that we aren’t even following are showing up in our streams. Those are certainly flaws, in my opinion, but this one outshines them all.

When you post a retweet (RT) using the currently accepted format of adding either “RT @hughbriss” or “via @hughbriss” on either Twitter proper, or any of the third-party apps, like TweetDeck or Seesmic, the result is the same. Your tweet (retweet) shows up in the stream of all of your followers and they can read your retweet no matter which of those applications they’re using. BUT… if you use the new Twitter retweet option, the only followers who will see it are the ones that use Twitter proper to read their tweet stream.

That, my friends, means that for most of us, a huge percentage of our followers would never see our retweets and that, is what I call a glaring flaw. The question is, was it done on purpose to draw third-party apps users back to Twitter or is it simply a case of the third-party apps just not being able to recognize the new format and requiring only a simple fix we’ll see in the next TweetDeck update?

Here is a screen shot from Twitter using a test account I set up to follow only myself for the purposes of this test. As you can see, there are three tweets and the one in the middle is a retweet.

Here is a screen shot of the same series of tweets on TweetDeck and as you can see in this image, the retweet that showed up on Twitter DOES NOT show up on TweetDeck and the same will be true on Seesmic or any other third-party app you’re using.

screengrab-tweetdeck

So, do you want all of your followers to see your retweets? If so, there’s only one option available to you. Continue to use the standard “RT @hughbriss” format when you retweet, whether you’re using Twitter or a third-party app.