Is it a good marketing practice to request retweets or does merely asking the question have an adverse effect on your followers? I find there is an argument for both sides.

The first viewpoint is that new B2B professionals on Twitter may not think of retweeting your post until it is mentioned. ‘Please Retweet’ should only be an addition to key messages that are of use to your target followers and their audience so this should be a suggestion that is easily acted on for the reader. The addition should never be used excessively or the recommendation will immediately lose value and will appear as if the entire message is spam. If used with both of the above scenarios, it is an acceptable method of obtaining earned advertising on Twitter. Some examples of suitable ‘Please RT’ instances are to gather awareness during trade shows, announce upcoming webinars or reveal a new whitepaper or web tool. Dan Zarrella of HubSpot “looked at the percentage of tweets that were retweeted and found that 51% of tweets that included "Please Retweet" were retweeted more than once, 39% of those including "Please RT" were retweeted more than once, and only 12% of tweets that included neither were retweeted more than once.”

The second perspective is that the request of a retweet is viewed as desperate and annoying. The suggestion immediately seems unprofessional in nature and should never be used. The intention of social media is to allow the reader to interact as they feel appropriate and should not be prompted to do so. David Meerman Scott’s “gut feeling” is that he is just turned off by this approach. Direct Messages to a specific person with a request to retweet a particular need would be a better approach for communication in the B2B market. 

I think the true answer to this question comes down to testing and knowledge of your audience. The next time you want to promote an upcoming event or offer of extreme value, think about adding a ‘Please RT’ message once and direct message key followers with a request to retweet. Then check your analytics and revise your strategy accordingly.