There are certain twitter accounts that are called, “prolific.” That word means producing offspring which doesn’t seem to capture what they do. These accounts, are either manned by humans somewhere 24 hours a day, or by computer programs, or a combination. I’m not sure what their “raison d’etre” could possibly be. They don’t make money from retweeting hundreds of people per day, and the quality of their retweets is so low, that I would not follow them. I tend to think that these prolific accounts are only followed by people who don’t read their inbox feed — ever. Because if you did read it, you would be flooded with very low quality stuff.
But, does it help if they retweet you?
First of all these prolific accounts seem to gravitate towards a particular tag. One account might retweet lots of stuff with the tag #animal for instance. If you use that particular hashtag regularly, you might get retweeted daily by these human robots or “hubots.” In any case, what I learned, is that a retweet from these guys, might get you seen by someone else who might retweet you again which might result in your tweet actually being seen by someone who will actually read it.
Selective retweeters
The benefit of being retweeted by what I call a “Selective retweeter,” who only retweets one or two things per day is much greater. Twitter created the retweet function so that top quality content could be accentuated, promoted, and shared. They didn’t do it so that every post with a particular tag would be shared. I have found that one retweet from someone selective is worth several retweets from the robots. Of course, it is hard to have hard statistics on this, since I don’t really know where my new followers are coming from. But, once I was retweeted by a selective person with 6000 followers. The following day, I had triple the new followers than I normally do. So, that particular retweet really meant something.
At the end of the day
When the day is over, and you are counting how many people retweeted you, that is not a metric. Change it to how many robot retweets did you get and how many selective retweets did you get. Then, see how many followers your selective folks had, add them up, and then you have a metric. That metric is exposure or reach for the day. How many inboxes your tweet reached. Of course at any given time on Twitter, probably only 2% of accounts are checking their inbox. But, if people like you, they will visit your account hours or days after you tweeted something, and favorite or retweet that special tweet that they liked so much!