How and Why to Share Quotes on Twitter

Do you ever share quotes on Twitter? Irene Koehler asked this on Twitter the other day and it got me thinking a bit. We all follow tweeters that keep churning out great quotes, some from other people and some from themselves. I seldom tweet quotes on Twitter myself but I do see the value in doing it.

Why share quotes on Twitter?

Quotes tend to get retweeted quite a bit, almost 30% of all retweets are quote-related. Why is this? Could be because there is no link to share and therefore no need to check out the link first and judge whether to share; what you see is what you get with quotes.
Furthermore, Twitter is well suited for quotes as most of them will be shorter than 140 characters and followers want to see quick snippets of wisdom, wit and genius.

Your own quotes

The best way to share quotes on Twitter is obviously to come up with them yourself. People like Scott Gainsburg and Malcolm Levenehave got this down to a tee, they continuously pump out great pearls of wisdom and food for thought. Where do they get all this stuff from? Nobody knows, they just seem to have and endless supply of inspiration coming their way. Which makes Twitter, the conversational platform, the perfect outlet I would say.Here’s food for thought from Malcolm:

Here’s Scott getting us thinking:

I would venture to say that these two fellows are Twitter thought leaders because of their great quotes and the fact that people love to share pearls of wisdom like these.

Look up quotes

If you don’t feel that inspired, you can get a book on quotes or even just on one person’s quotes (I got great a Churchill quote book for Christmas, it’s huge as you can imagine).When you do start looking up quotes you’ll also noticed them more all around you. Whenever you read a good quote in the paper, hear it from someone or see it in a film – use it to your advantage on Twitter.

Another way would be to Google your way to quotes, there are plenty of quotes directories such as the Quoations Page. These sites will index quotes by the person, topic, theme and purpose.The final tip on how to look up quotes is to actually search for them on Twitter! A bit cheeky yes, but if you put in the hashtag #quote or #quotes you’ll find loads of great quotes all served up on a plate. If you want to narrow down the search results, put a keyword like ‘funny’ or ‘inspirational’ in the search string.

The automated way

Although I would highly recommend that you tweet quotes that actually mean something to you and hopefully evokes some type of emotion with others, you can also go down the automated route. If you’re short on time and still want to be quoting away on Twitter, you can always use an automated service like Tweet-Quotes.com that will do if for you.
Just like with any automation online, I wouldn’t recommend this unless your really know what you’re doing. Please bear in mind that it’s easy to lose that human touch and come across as another spam bot.

My plan of action

I love quotes and tend to retweet clever ones I come across. For some reason I haven’t really been sharing many quotes, not even my own… The plan is to tweet a quote per day, preferably something witty. Keep an eye out at @JorgenSundberg for my progress and do let me know if my quotes are lame!

Your turn

Do you like reading quotes on Twitter? Do you tend to retweet them?

Filed Under: Events, Twitter Tagged With: quotes, Twitter

http://twitter.com/fnordleblanket Jimmo

I have to speak up as someone who is NOT a fan of quotes. I find the incessant stream of trite and cheesy quotations to be tiresome noise from people who, for the most part, are simply popularity whores in bulk broadcast mode – trying to get as many followers and retweets as possible but offering virtually nothing by way of meaningful dialogue, interaction or intellectual stimulus…or hell, even news!

I’ve had countless self-titled social media experts (or similar) follow me, purely so that I follow them back, whereupon they flood me with these wretched pithy sayings all day long.

One assumes that this is a generalisation and there are some social media “experts” who know how to at least maintain a reasonable signal to noise ratio…but if so, they’re in a minority.

Twitter is, apparently, the Golgafrincham ‘B’ Ark of the internet.