On Tuesday, June 14, Twitter announced that its users can now retweet themselves.
According to Tech Times, the retweet button could be previously used only on tweets from other accounts, being unavailable for clicking on your own tweet. But now the feature has become available for your own tweets on both the mobile app and desktop version of Twitter.
The self-retweet functionality works in the same way as the traditional retweet feature. Users have to tap or click or tap on the arrow icon. Then, a pop-up window will open, allowing the users to quote the tweet by adding a comment or sharing the tweet again.
Some Twitter users might take advantage of the new retweet feature in order to highly self-promote themselves. However, most of the users might like the fact that they can now bring back their favorite tweets.
Twitter has announced more updates beside this self-retweet feature. The social network revealed that media attachments and @names will not count anymore toward the 140 character limit. Also, when mentioning a user, a period will no longer be needed before the "@."
The series of updates were announced by Twitter last month on the company's blog. The self-retweet feature is just the first of several changes to be made to the site.
According to the British online publication V3, the new self-retweet functionality is now live, but you can only retweet yourself once. Twitter has also updated the block feature. This might be useful for those not pleased about the self-retweet feature.
The Twitter changes do not have much impact, but they underline Twitter's efforts to make the social media platform easier to understand and more functional. Twitter strives to balance its strategy to attract new users with its efforts to retain core users.
The changes introduced by the latest Twitter update also illustrate the vision of the new CEO Jack Dorsey as he aims to increase growth and revenue. Since taking over, Dorsey has already made some bold moves, including cutting 336 jobs. The social media company has struggled to grow in recent years, while rival Facebook took a dominant position on the market.
