Yesterday, Shoq offered two reasons you shouldn’t use Twitter’s built-in or “native” retweet feature. Me, I much prefer the new-style native retweet function, and I tell you why later. But, first, I think Shoq and others are wrong for preferring the old-style retweet.
First, Shoq argues that if everyone uses native retweets, we’ll all miss important things.
Repetitive tweets tell you a story mattered to a lot of your followers. You might ignore the first few retweets you see, but when the 3rd, 4th or 5th come in, you’re going to notice, and may well be glad that you did.
This is true if all people are sharing is the original tweet and not engaging in any sort of conversation or adding their own thoughts. If a story is important, people will be adding their thoughts and sharing other links to important parts of the story.
Now, this might seem to reinforce Shoq’s second reason against using native retweets:
Users can’t add their own comments to the built-in retweets
This is true. You can’t add a comment to the original tweet with the new-style retweet. But with only 140 characters it’s hard to do that with the old-style retweet without completely mangling the original tweet anyway. If I want to reshare a link and add my own comment, rather than butchering the original poster’s words I prefer write my own post and credit with a “via @username” at the end.
Native retweets give my followers control over seeing what they’re retweeting since I can turn off native retweets on an per-user bases. I can’t do that with old-style retweets. Native retweets keep 15 instances of the same post out of my timeline. Native retweets shares original tweets without the need to mangle “to,” “your” and “for” into “2,” “yr” and “4.”
Twitter’s native retweets are certainly imperfect, but I find the hard-core stances against native retweeting hard to understand.