I’m on Twitter. I consider myself “active”, but perhaps I’m more of a lurker than a tweeter. I do know that I retweet a lot (a “retweet” being the act of forwarding someone else’s tweet to your followers). In particular, I like to retweet posts by creators I like when they’re trying to spread the word about their work. So when Creator A says “Please preorder my book with code XXWHATXX”, I retweet it to all my followers. This allows them to spread the word about their comic, and hopefully pick up some new followers at the same time.

So now that I’m promoting Zi and trying my best to get the word out about my webcomic, how many retweets do I get? Just one, from…some retweet bot.

Now, I’m not expecting anything from anyone. Wait, scratch that. Clearly, I am expecting something, which is that people for whom I took the time to retweet could pay back the favor and retweet a message or two of mine. But I’m not for a minute under the illusion that I’m entitled to that. After all, we haven’t signed any contracts here, or made any verbal agreements. It’s true, some people do expressly ask you to retweet with a “Please RT!” in their message. And those people do have an obligation to return the favor in kind. But many of my retweets are for those who haven’t expressly asked for anything. I’m certainly not entitled to get a retweet from them.

But a sense of entitlement is different from expectation. Perhaps I’m looking at the Twitter community with rose-tinted glasses, but I would expect people to do the same and return the favor, the same way you’d hope that someone you did a favor for would do the favor back when you needed it. It’s just common courtesy, right? (Or part of the evolution of our brains, which, despite or because of the cruel nature of the natural world, created emotions like sympathy and kindness, so that when it was our turn to ask for help, there would be someone there willing to offer it.)

In any case, the situation still stands. In the past 2.whatever weeks, I’ve posted perhaps a dozen or more tweets promoting Zi, half of which expressly asked for retweets. And all I’ve got to show for it is one from a bot(!) But wait, no, someone did retweet me, but only because I mentioned them by name in the tweet, giving them credit for something.

So clearly, my Twitter promotion tactics are failing like some hapless Greek phalanx against a Roman legion in the 2nd century BC. If I don’t figure something out, I’ll go the way of the Hellenes and find myself subjugated by the very people to whom I taught civiliza — wait, never mind.

The bottom-line isn’t that people should retweet me because I’ve been kind enough to do it for them. It’s that if they’re not doing it, I need to figure a out a better Twitter strategy.

So I’m going to experiment, and try some different things, and I’ll report back the results here when I’ve got something (hopefully positive!) to say.

Update: I do realize that some people who might consider retweeting one of my messages simply wasn’t on Twitter at the time and didn’t see my post. Since my following is rather small, the low number of retweets could be due to that simple fact.