When someone likes that status and wants to share it with others, they will at RT for ReTweet and the users name typically and post the same update.

This is usually done with Tweets containing links, so naturally it provides a good, viral means of link exposure. So far, a service called Tweetmeme has pretty much ruled this area of content sharing. What it does is supply content providers with a button that users can easily click to share that content on Twitter. The button then provides an ongoing count of how many times an article has been retweeted.