A blog is a place where periodic content is posted in reverse chronological order.  Why I bring that up in the first sentence will become clear later on in the post.

Every so often, I see an old post from Ben Parr over at Mashable surface in my various timelines called “How to Retweet: A Guide to Retweeting on Twitter.” I’ve successfully avoided commenting on it up until now (the post was originally written in April of this year), generally because I don’t like to talk bad about my successors over there, but I have a hard time not chuckling every time I see it pop up.

I only bring it up today because my buddy Sean Percival over at LalaWag has written a very similar post over at his blog entitled “RT: The Art of the Retweet.” Earlier last week, the popular post on retweets had to do with the top ten things you never want to do on Twitter, with a few pointers on how to execute a retweet with grace and aplomb.

Rather than see this become a trend where everyone I know starts writing Re-tweet guides all willy-nilly, I thought I’d step in and clarify a few things, because I truly feel that if you’re going to guide people on how to hit a button in their Twitter client properly, there should be a certain format you follow when you write such a post.

Pretty Pictures are Important

The Clever Title

Ironically, the point of writing a retweet guide isn’t to necessarily provide any actual guidance, and that’s important to realize from the very start.  You’ve got a two-fold purpose in writing your post, and that two-fold purpose’ is most embodied in the title.

Your first aim is to create content that ranks in search engines very well, so when all your friends’ grandmothers finally work up the courage to proposition Larry King via that Twitter thing they keep hearing about, your post is the first to pop up.

The key here is to start out with a very generic sounding title, but work as many Twitter terms into it as possible.

Here are a few suggestions and examples that haven’t been taken yet (as best I can tell):

• Twitter: Retweet Your Way To Larry King’s Heart
• Twitter: RT 123!
• HOW TO: Retweet for Free on Twitter.
• Using Twitter to Retweet Your Way to Riches
• The Complete Moron’s Guide to Pushing the Retweet Button
• Twitter McTwitter Retweets a Tweet

One thing you’ll notice is that almost every post title I’ve come up with includes the word Twitter in it, and tries to incorporate at least one other Twitter term.  This is key to your success in the second most important aim of your article, which is to get retweeted all over Twitter.

The Almost Useful Content

It’s important to start out your post out explaining what a retweet is.  You notice that I started out this blog post explaining what a blog was.  You should do something like that.

It’s almost certain that 100% of the people reading your post will already know what a retweet is, but as long as you mention it up front in a teacherly sort of way, people will feel the urge to retweet your post now because it’ll be like they’re helping newbies (that is, if your awesome post title didn’t already compel them to retweet without reading the post).

It’s important that never mention the fact that most people just hit the RT button on a Twitter client until the very end of the post.  Most Twitter users have attention spans like gnats. If you haven’t figured it out yet,

Sure, I suppose you could go into truly useful data about what causes virility on Twitter, what the more common words are in people’s retweets, or talk about the best time of day to get retweets, but to be quite honest, that’s a lot of work and research, and there’s no real need to expend that sort of effort when you can just be clever, sarcastic or just plain cynical.

Note the tone of this post.  Clearly it was written far too late at night after reading one too many retweet guides. It’s likely to make someone chuckle, and doesn’t provide the casual reader with a lot of useful information (unless they too are going for an SEO play). It’s a good tone to imitate in whatever retweet guide you pen, though if you’re not concerned with conversation beyond retweets (and why would you be?), you can feel free to leave any sort of jocularity out of the post.

The Kicker: Ask for a Retweet

All good retweet guides should end with an empassioned plea for a retweet.

So, you there, you plan on retweeting this or what?