Earlier this week, the question was raised on if you should turn off retweets on Twitter and if this was common practice among other Twitter users.
If you’re unfamiliar with this feature and are scratching your head on why someone would want to turn off retweets on Twitter in the first place, you’re not alone.
Most users don’t even know this feature exists, so why would they want to turn off retweets?
The overcrowded Twitter stream
If your Twitter stream has gotten overrun with too many retweets from specific followers, you can simply reduce the number of retweets that you’re seeing in your stream just by turning off retweets.
When you turn retweets off on Twitter, one thing to remember, you’re not turning off all of the retweets that you see in your Twitter stream. What you’re doing is turning off retweets for specific users that you follow.
This means that in your Twitter stream, you’ll still see all of the normal tweets from a specific user, just not the ones that they retweet from others.
Should I turn off retweets on Twitter?
One thing that puzzled me about turning off retweets is that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to begin with. Why would someone want to turn off their retweets?
Most sites on the web are teaching you different ways to get more retweets. There’s even the Twitter list feature, which was recently expanded to allow you to create 1,000 Twitter lists with 5,000 members in each.
You can also create a Twitter retweet link to include in your content to encourage people to retweet and share it more!
So should you turn off retweets on Twitter?
Personally, I don’t see the point of turning off retweets. Sure, my Twitter stream may be full of retweets, but that’s a good thing, because normally, that’s how I discover new people to follow.
To discover or not to discover, that is the question
When you go to turn off retweets on Twitter, remember, there’s no magic switch to automatically turn off retweets for specific users. You actually have to go to each profile and turn off retweets for that user.
To me, that seems like a waste of time. I could avoid all of this by creating a Twitter list for people that retweet too much (make sure you make it private so they don’t see the name of the list) and consume my Twitter stream this way.
One other thing about turning off retweets is that you are turning off the discovery side of Twitter.
Retweets are a great way to learn about new content, but also to find new people on Twitter that your followers follow, but you don’t. This means you’re going to need to spend more time finding new users to follow.
Overall, it seems like you’ll need to also find more time in your day if you choose to go this route and turn off retweets.
I like to give the following example when talking about turning off retweets.
Turning off retweets on Twitter is like turning off likes, comments and shares on Facebook. (tweet this).
How to turn off retweets on Twitter
If you’re still not convinced and want to turn off retweets on Twitter, here’s how.
1. Sign in to Twitter
2. Visit a Twitter users profile who you want to turn off retweets for
3. Click the dropdown menu next to the “follow” button. Select “turn off retweets”
Question: Do you find your Twitter stream overcrowded with too many retweets and would you consider spending the time to go through your hundreds or even thousands of followers to turn off retweets for each? Let me know how you feel about turning off retweets by leaving a comment below.
