The AM/PM Retweet

To be blunt, the practice of retweeting your own article multiple times has been annoying me lately. I'm constantly reading the same tweets over and over again. The biggest offenders are people that need page views to be successful. I'm mostly talking about mainstream media here. I haven't witnessed this practice from bloggers so much.

To the right we have exhibit A, a search of my timeline for the phrase "AM RT." Here we see both Bruce Feldman (@bfeldmancbs) and Pete Thamel (@PeteThamelNYT) retweeting links to their own stories. Again, I was annoyed, but should I have been?

Look, I get it. Page views equal money for these guys. They need them to stay employed. It is highly possible that someone could have missed their tweet in the evening and caught the AM RT. This makes the second tweet worth it for the writer, but annoying to me.

Since I was torn as to whether my annoyance was justified, I reached out to social media expert Greg Tirico (@gregt12) to get his thoughts on the matter. Here's what Greg had to say:

I do see duplicate content/retweets at different times of the day. This is totally normal and an accepted practice. The theory being that most people follow hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts. With that much noise you need to say something more than once to get anywhere close to full attention. My personal practices have led me to never post the same thing twice on the same day. But, I will throw up stuff twice (with a different quick spin/perspective) if I notice it getting a lot of retweets or mentions.

Tirico went on to say:

So, yeah...the journalists you follow are compensated based on page view. No doubt about that and it gives them a monetary incentive to tweet often. Duplicated tweets (AM/PM RT) make a lot of sense for them even if they are being slightly annoying. If they spaced it out over a few days (like I do) then the half life of their stories might be an issue. Who cares that Kessler signed at UGA (@marcweiszer PM RT pictured left) two days from now? It's old news at that point from a Twitter perspective.

So, after my exchange with Greg Tirico, I've decided to lay off on Feldman, Thamel, and Weiszer for their practice of AM/PM retweeting. Even if it annoys some people, myself included, it's probably worth the risk of getting more pageviews for their story. Plus, it's not like I've gone and un-followed any of these guys. So how bad could it really have been?