What is the difference between "reply" and "ReTweet" on Twitter?

[Mia B]

I'm a n00b to it and I am not sure, thanks!

[knowguy]

A reply means you are responding to someone else's tweet and want the author of the previous tweet to see it. A retweet means that you are broadcasting what the previous author wrote and *not* responding back to the original author.

[KathrynV]

A short answer to your question is that Replies are responses to what someone else has written on Twitter wheras ReTweets are when you want to share what someone else has written with others so you copy and paste it as a Tweet update.

ReTweets are a great way to share information but it's important to acknowledge the person who originally posted the message. To do this, you simply put RT at the start of your tweet so that everyone knows that it was ReTweeted as a copy-and-paste from someone else. So, for example, if one of your Twitter friends posts a Tweet that says "Great article on coffee: link" and you want to share that, you post it as an update on your own Twitter page but you post it as RT: "Great article on coffee: link".

In contrast to this, replies are when you are posting for the specific purpose of responding to someone else's Twitter post. So you might want to respond to the above example with something like, "really loved that article on coffee, here's another one (link)".

It's important to note that there are two types of Replies. You can do an @Reply which will show up in your Twitter feed and be available for other people to see it or you can do a Direct Reply message which will only be viewed by the person you're responding to. For example, let's say that you wanted to respond with "cool, let's do coffee" and your phone number but you don't want everyone to see your number, you could do a Direct Reply so it would only go to the Twitter friend you want to get that information.