Sharing, Retweeting and Mentions on Facebook and Twitter

Twitter and Facebook have changed the way that many of us communicate. Not only do we communicate with our friends and family differently now, but we consumer news and other media differently. We interact with current and potential customers differently. We get breaking news from Twitter and Facebook, not from the evening news. It’s because of this that it’s so important to know how to best share that information. Twitter and Facebook are the two largest social media sites in the country and each site has created simple ways to communicate important information with your friends or people who follow you.

Sharing on Twitter: Retweeting

On Twitter, there are a few different ways to share, or Retweet, information. The first way to do it is through what I’ll call the “classic retweet.” Seen below, the “classic retweet” simply consists of copying and pasting the message that someone else posted, and adding an “RT @username” to the beginning of the message to let people know you’re sharing someone else’s message. In this case, both @VisitIndy posted the message and @TCMIndy retweeted it before we did:

This “classic retweet” has been around nearly as long as Twitter has and was a practice that grew organically from Twitter’s users. Recently, Twitter implemented an official Retweet function, seen in the image below:

You can see the underlined Retweet link in the image above. If you wanted to retweet the message that @ThisIsIndiana posted, simply click on the Retweet icon and you’ll share that message with your followers.

You can see the Retweet icon () next to the status update. In this case, @VisitBtown clicked on the Retweet link to share @IIB‘s message with their followers.

However you choose to share information on Twitter, retweeting is a useful way to share important updates with your followers. You can use these retweeting techniques to spread the word about different events going on in your area, sales going on at local establishments or state-wide promotions to help inform your followers about what they can see and do in Indiana.

Sharing on Facebook: Shares and Mentions

Sharing information on Facebook isn’t always as easy as clicking a Retweet button and being done, but in some cases, it can be!

If you like Visit Indiana on Facebook (see Quick Update below), you can easily share any of our photos, blog posts, links and anything else that has the share link as seen below:

When you click on the share link, you’ll be presented with an overlay window like the one seen below. You can then insert your own message and when you click the Share button, the message and link/image/post you shared will show up on your wall.

Sharing content in this way is extremely easy and can dramatically increase the reach of your content. Once your page has 10,000 fans (I know, that’s a lot of fans!) you’ll be able to see detailed sharing statistics in addition to the information you can currently view with Facebook Insights.

One last feature I’ll talk about is the use of Facebook Mentions. Similar to the way you can mention @VisitIndiana in your tweets on Twitter, you can also now mention people you are friends with or organizations you like through Facebook.

Quick update – Right when I was in the middle of writing this post, Facebook changed the way they refer to organizations’ fans. From now on, you can “Like” pages rather than become “A Fan”. This appears to be merely a semantic difference, but we’ll start referring to our fans as people who “like Visit Indiana”. For consistency’s sake, we’ll also refer to “Fan Pages” as simply “Pages”

In the image below, you can see I mentioned both Tastings Indianapolis and Conrad Indianapolis. This message was posted on our Visit Indiana Page, but since it mentioned Tastings and the Conrad, it also showed up on each of their pages! This is a great way to spread the word from your official page, rather than from your personal profile.

The only caveat here is that in order to mention an organization, you have to personally “like” their page. In other words, if you manage the Madison Indiana Facebook Fan Page, buy you haven’t personally “liked” the Visit Indiana Fan Page yet, you won’t be able to mention us.

It’s really easy to mention another organization or person in your status updates. Simply type the @ symbol then start typing the name of the person or page and a list will pop up for you of all people you’re friends with and all pages that you “like”. You can see in the status update below that it’s very easy to include mentions in your Facebook status updates.

It’s really easy to share information via Twitter and Facebook and these techniques will give you even more flexibility to share the information you want with the people you want.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages
2. What is Twitter?