Back in the day, you could retweet somebody only by cutting and pasting the original message and then typing in all the extra info. Tedious. So when Twitter added the Retweet button in fall 2009—which reduced retweeting to a single click—people were pleased. But passing along posts with the Retweet button has some drawbacks.

The good news is that the Retweet button makes your life easy. You just mouse over a tweet, and then click the Retweet link that appears. Twitter passes the message along to your followers verbatim, and it looks like it came from the original writer (as shown on the previous page). You don’t have to cut characters or add anything in. Twitter even keeps track of the messages you post with the Retweet button and those you’ve written that others have retweeted using this method. Just look under the Retweets tab.