For people new to Twitter, learning how to identify a retweet can be difficult, especially since retweets manifest themselves in 2 different ways.
Really quickly though, let’s review what a rewteet is, so we’re all on the same page. When you retweet a message, you are sharing another person’s post with your followers and ensuring that the original creator is getting credit.
Way #1: The letters “RT”
A retweet is indicated in some tweets as RT. The format with these messages that have RT is “RT @username-of-original-tweeter:”
Retweet with RT:
Notice the format: “RT @biz:” @biz — Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter — is the person that wrote the message: “I’m keeping my day job and I’ve accepted a new role as Social Impact Advisor at Aol…”
Rhys Howell decided to share that message with his followers and even added commentary after Biz’s message: “Wow, good luck with that!” If you’re retweeting, you can add commentary before or after the original message.
I decided to add commentary at the beginning of the following message.
Retweet with RT and beginning commentary:
There is no hard and fast rule on RT commentary. Put it at the end or the beginning, whichever you prefer.
Way #2: Fancy arrows, sans RT
But not all retweets have RT in the Twitter message. If you RT someone else’s post using Twitter.com – as opposed to a Twitter client like TweetDeck or Seesmic – you will not get the option to add your own commentary. As a result, the letters RT will not appear, and the retweet will look something like the image below.
Retweet without the letters RT:
The above screenshot is a picture of a message that I retweeted using Twitter.com. The green triangle in the upper left corner indicates that I retweeted the message.
It also shows the person that originally said this, @falseSteveJobs, and next to his name are little arrows that Twitter has designated as the Retweet arrows. The arrows icon is followed by my name, the person that retweeted it.
I hope that answered some questions for you! If you have any more, please leave them below and I will answer them shortly.