MT on Twitter

If you’re on twitter, you already know that “RT” stands for retweet — forwarding or re-posting someone’s tweet to your followers. Well I’ve been noticing a new trend and it turns out that it’s not new at all. At least in terms of social media time.

People have been using “MT” to indicate a Modified Tweet. It’s basically a retweet that’s been edited. Makes sense, right? I’ve been seeing it more and more recently but I found mentions of this in blogs from as far back as August 2010. That’s ancient history on twitter.

When should you use MT instead of RT? Here are three answers:

More twitter abbreviations you should know:

  • MT = Modified tweet. This means the tweet you’re looking at is a paraphrase of a tweet originally written by someone else.
  • RT = Retweet. The tweet you’re looking at was forwarded to you by another user.
  • DM = Direct message. A direct-message is a message only you and the person who sent it can read. IMPORTANT: To DM someone all you need to type is D username message.
  • PRT = Partial retweet. The tweet you’re looking at is the truncated version of someone else’s tweet.
  • HT = Hat tip. This is a way of attributing a link to another Twitter user.
  • CC = Carbon-copy. Works the same way as email.

Feel free to use MT when modifying a tweet. I think this trend is going to stick around.

1 Comments

  1. Bob Foley

    I love that there are people left that still put some thought into RTs and use the old style RTs instead of the “Lazy retweet function”.

    Sadly, I see people using the RT function to try to win contests. I don’ think they realize that in many cases, the contest promoter can only see the most recent 15 lazy retweets.

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