How to Correctly Add Your Own Comment to a Retweet on Twitter (An Original 'Quote Tweet' - Before 'Quote Tweets' Were a Thing)

It seems at present that very few people know the professional way to add their own comment to a retweet. Indeed, the mighty Yahoo! Answers doesn't appear to have the solution at the time of this post, and not even Twitter itself is showing anything near the top of the Google results... So I thought I’d pass on the official (if not very widely publicised) Twitter method.

Okay, so we’ve all seen it… Twitter users copying and pasting someone else’s tweet into their ‘What’s happening?’ box, then putting speech marks around it, then maybe typing the letters ‘RT’ in front of it, then trying desperately to squeeze their own comment into the 15 characters or so of remaining space. It’s a lot of hassle, it looks a mess, and a lot of the time no one knows who’s supposed to have said what.

So let’s look at the right way to combine your comment with a retweet… Start by spotting a tweet you want to pass on to your own followers, with your own comment. Then, in the top right hand corner of the tweet, right-click on the date or timestamp, and select Copy Link Location/Address from the context menu. You can see how it should look below. Please note that the yellow highlighting of the datestamp is my way of drawing attention to the link you should right-click – it won’t be yellow on Twitter...



Now click on your Compose New Tweet button, and type in whatever comment you want to make. You should have at least 114 characters for this, so it’s almost like you can make a whole tweet of your own before adding your ‘retweet’. Once you’ve made your comment, enter down a couple of lines to create some space between your comment and the ‘retweet’ (just for neat display - it's not strictly necessary), then just right-click in the box and select Paste from the context menu. A link to the original tweet will appear after you've clicked on Paste. The steps are shown graphically below…



Finally, simply click on the Tweet button, and you’ve posted your own comment, with the original tweet enclosed neatly within the same message. It should look like this…



Please remember that this method depends on the continued availability of the original tweet. If the original tweet gets deleted, or the account gets suspended or whatever, the link in your ‘retweet’ goes dead and the original tweet will no longer display. Given that Twitter is all about the moment, though, and it’s not really designed as an ‘archive’, I would definitely favour this method as a professional looking way of getting your thoughts, and someone else’s thoughts, packed into a single tweet.