Twitter is now letting us add comments to our retweets – why this is good news

What a nice surprise today, Twitter! I have always wanted to have the ability to offer my own comments when sharing someone else’s tweet on my timeline. Retweeting something without having the chance to explain why I think it’s valuable and how it can be relevant or helpful to my followers has always been bothering me.

So, it is great that users like me, who like to read most of the things that are on their Twitter timeline and are eager to share content that has high educational value, are now getting the extra character space to explain to their followers why they think the resource or news or information they are retweeting is “worth it”.

Thanks to this new feature, now users can become more involved in the sharing process – instead of just hitting the RT (retweet) button, they can tell a story or share what they like about the content and why they are recommending it to others. This gives them the opportunity to act as curators and create value for their followers. And it is good news both for the brands that are creating and promoting the content, and for the audiences that are now able to see a lot more than just a tweet that has been retweeted a certain number of times. It also changes the emphasis from a quantitative to a more qualitative way of endorsing valuable content.

If a tweet has led you to this great article that shares cool stats or offers insights that would be really helpful to your audience, what better way to alert your followers not to miss it than to offer your own caption or comment?

I was so excited about this new feature that I gave it a try the moment I saw it was available, and it worked really well. Here are my first couple of curated tweets: