I have had a number of questions in the past couple of weeks from my Facebook friends who are trying to figure out what in the world I’m saying in some of my Facebook posts. I’ve considered posting a message in FB to explain, but decided to blog about it instead in case any of my vast audience is interested. OK, maybe there are only about 5 of you, but you are important to me. Then I will tweet a link to the new post so you can see how it works.

“Wait…what’s tweet a link” you say? Oops…there I go making up words again! Yes, the title of this post is one of the questions I have received, but here is the one I received from a friend this morning that prompted me to action:

“Can you explain exactly what ‘RT @paulawhite’ is? Is it a way to give credit for what you are posting?”

And the answer is:

I have my Twitter account and my Facebook account tied together, so every time I post to Twitter, the post is automatically re-posted on FB. That way I don’t have to post it in both places to get the info to my different networks of friends. So what I’m really using is Twitter shorthand.

Since users only have 140 characters to post a message in Twitter, shorthand is very important. When you want to send a message to another Twitter user’s attention, or to give them credit when you share something you got from them with your own network, you put the @ before their username. On Twitter, each post is called a “tweet”. To send someone else’s tweet out to your followers is called a “retweet”, shortened to RT.

So “RT @paulawhite” means “retweet from user paulawhite”, or “I got this great information from a tweet by Paula White, and I want to share it with my friends, too”, leaving me onlly 39 characters to send her message…not nearly enough.

Why would I want to send the tweet if Paula already did? See…only the people who follow Paula on Twitter get her message. Some of the people who follow me also follow Paula, but not all of them. I think her message is worth passing along, so I will retweet to my Twitter followers and Facebook friends, and some of them may decide to do the same with their followers and friends.

Thus, as my friend David Jakes would say…”the network wins again!” Translated to Tweetspeak: RT @djakes “The network wins again!”

OK, I admit it…I’m not sure Tweetspeak is a word.