Dear people who retweet things on Twitter:
There is a retweet button. There is! You don't have to copy and paste a tweet into your tweet box, adding RT and the @username of the retweet-
ee. You can just click a button! It's so easy to do, you might have done it by accident a few times.
I mention this because, as I'm sure you know, tweets are limited to 140 characters, and adding "RT @username" takes about 10% of them, even devoid of any scintillating additional commentary like "LOL!" Thus, if the tweet you are retweeting was close to the character limit, you will have to change what you are saying the person tweeted from what they actually tweeted, which is bad, or you will have to cut it off with a link to the rest of the tweet, which is even worse. And the link takes up
even more of the available characters, meaning that your followers will get, at best, about half of the original tweet.
Luckily, there's an easy-to-use retweet button that displays the original tweet, in its unmolested entirety, in the twitter stream of your followers!
For example,
this tweet of mine, regarding the unfortunate wording of HP's sponsored trending topic, was retweeted by two people. You can see that it was retweeted by one person, because he used the button. (Another reason to use the button!) The other person didn't use the button, resulting in a tweet that
looks like this. What was my point? Who knows? Nobody, unless you click the link to
view the rest of a single tweet. Note also the mangled capitalization of my username, and the way it was cut off mid-word.
USE THE BUTTON.
<3,
robo
(Oh, and for the record, HP changed their sponsored trending topic to #smallbutpowerful, which is...probably not any better.)