Twitter is, on the face of it, pretty simple. But even simple, mainly text-based social sites have their rules. One that confuses many people is the case of the @mention thinking it’s an @reply. What does this mean, you may ask? And should you care?
If you want to share something with all of your Twitter followers, you want to maximize the chances of your tweet being visible to them.
Confusion in 140 characters: an example
Here’s an example I came across yesterday, when a hanover team member tweeted a blog post written by one of her colleagues. The tweet read as follows:
The above tweet thinks it is an @reply rather than a standard @mention. In other words, Twitter assumes you’re trying to reply to a message rather than posting a fresh one of your own. A proper @reply is one where you hit the ‘reply’ button below a tweet, before posting your own response. However, when you post a tweet beginning with an @username, Twitter will interpret it as an @reply instead of an @mention and thus different rules apply.
Why does this matter?
An @mention is visible in all your followers’ timelines, but an @reply is not. You will only see an @reply in your timeline if both of these criteria are met: (a) you must be following the person who posted it; (b) you must be following the person who is mentioned in the @reply. An unintended @reply is therefore less visible than you may have wanted it to be. When your aim is to increase web traffic to and readership of your blog, don’t forget to tweet smart.
How to ensure an @mention doesn’t think it’s an @reply
The tip for making this kind of tweet visible to all of your followers, in their timelines, is to place a dot/period (.@username), a question mark (?@username) or an exclamation mark (?@username) directly, without a space, before a Twitter @username in a tweet. Here’s an example:
Alternatively, place some text before the @username. Here’s an example:
You can read more about this issue on Twitter’s help pages here and here.
Bonus Twitter tips
What does it mean to have 10, 100 or a 1,000 Twitter followers? Are you more influential if you have 500 vs. 50? Try a free service that measures your social media influence, such as Klout or Peer Index.
Do you suddenly become inspired to send a brace of tweets? No one likes electronic spam; it could be bad for your online reputation. Try Buffer to automatically space your tweets out through the coming days. Or use Tweetdeck to schedule a tweet at a specific time/day. When posting a scheduled tweet, it’s important to carry a smartphone with you, in case you change your mind about it later. This is particularly pertinent for organisations and brands. What appears to be a clever message one minute, might not be the next. As Harold Macmillian may have once said when questioned as to what may blow his government off-course: “Events, my dear boy, events.”
Image Credit: Twitter Wallpaper by JoshSemans via Flickr