Preface your Tweets?

Posted by Gabe on July 3, 2009 under Twitter, Twitter for Beginners | 4 Comments to Read

You might have heard that Twitter recently changed the way that direct replies are handled.  It used to be that you as a subscriber had a choice to see the conversations going on between two people, regardless if you followed both of them or not.  Now, that “feature” has been removed.  So what that means is that if you @reply to someone, and the “@someone” is the first item in the tweet, the only people who will see this tweet are those that follow both you and @someone.  Why are some people against this? It is because that is the way many of us learn about new people by learning how they interact with others.  I also believe that if someone pays you a compliment or does something nice they deserve to be thanked in front of the largest audience possible.

There is an easy workaround to this and you may have seen others use it.  If you preface the @reply with a period or exclamation point, everyone in your follower stream will see the tweet.  So then “@KidsAreHeroes Thanks!” becomes .@KidsAreHeroes Thanks!  Another way to do it is like this – instead of:

@KidsAreHeroes Thanks for the RT!

You could write:

Thanks to @KidsAreHeroes for the RT!

Happy Tweeting!