I got several questions about some twitter features these days. That’s why I thought I’d reply to them here too. Question no.1 (more coming soon) was:
What do the letters “RT” at the beginning of a twitter posting mean?
“RT” is the abbreviation for “ReTweeting”. This means to repeat a twitter posting (= tweet) of someone else with the (fully or mainly) copied text of a tweet.
Such a “retweet” starts with a “RT” and the @username of the one who posted the original tweet. The “RT” shows your readers that you repeat something you have read elsewhere and the @username presents the source of this text.
Example:
original tweet read in the feed of @9lives353
same tweet "retweeted" by someone else
As always the @username becomes clickable in a retweet. This allows the readers of the retweet to click back to the orignal posting (to verify or to see if there are more interesting tweets or just to find out who the quoted person is).
Btw. the number of retweets can be considered as a factor to measure a user’s authority on twitter. The main purpose though is to make sure the original source can be identified.
Another way to mention the source of something you tweet about is to add (via @username ) at the end of your tweet.
Btw. make sure you have a space between @username and any character before or behind it! Otherwise twitter will interpret this character as part of the username which will break the link to this user.
The via-solution is mostly used for tweets that contain the same link as the original tweet but might have been rephrased or completed by a comment or question.
Or if you retweet a retweet. 
Which could look like this:
someone retweets a RT of @9lives353 he/she got from @username's feed
If you have further questions about retweets please let me know!
That 9lives353 blog was brilliant
Thanks for the lesson…
[...] Retweeting (RT) on Twitter%AUTHOR% [...]
So how would I ReTweet a ReTweet os someone’s ReTweet?
@joen You retweet a previous retweet by doing the same thing twice. Example:
@schwindtpr has tweeted something that @someone has retweeted. If you now retweet @someone ’s retweet you’d write:
RT@someone RT@schwindtpr has written something with a shortlink
OR you just retweet the original poster and add the (via…).
Which imho is better because you credit the original source and just add the channel that directed you there.
Example:
RT@schwindtpr has written something with a shortlink (via @someone)
[...] Interestingly it’s the most basic blogposts I write that are the most successful. Like my article about retweeting on twitter that is on top of my statistics for two months now. Today I got a message on facebook from a [...]
I’m still learning about twitter basics… At least on twitter.com I can’t follow back a RT, unless of course it has just been twitted and if I go to the user it will be the first twit.
Very unlike replying to twits, where I can “easily” (it’s actually not as simple as it should) find the conversation.
I’m sure RT is not maintained by twitter and so if I want to actually find the way back there must be another system able to track ‘em. I just don’t know any options yet.
So, any suggestions?
Tracking tweets or retweets is easy if you use the username that has sent the tweet or the username that is retweeted. Use the twitter search form to look for the keyword or username. If you want to monitor this search term constantly use http://search.twitter.com and subscribe to the resulting feed for this query.
Thanks. It is easy. But it ain’t simple, since you have to know. Although I feel stupid for not realising this before.
Thanks again!
By the way, about @joen RT question, I can’t see any problem in just using:
RT @secondguy something written with a shortlink
instead:
RT @secondguy RT @firstguy something written with a shortlink
because you can track back using the search anyway.
the only problem here is if a tweet is deleted…
anyway, I am particularly starting to use the reply instead:
@secondguy RT something written with a shortlink