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!

csread said,

This is great advice Gabe and very timely! I’m teaching a class on Wednesday night and this work around is perfect. Things change so quickly on these sites that it honestly takes a village just to keep up! I appreciate all you do in so generously sharing your knowledge with all of us!

Catherine
Twitter: @csread61
Gabe said,

That’s very kind of you to say and I’m happy to do it! :)
Annie McMahon said,

I prefer to only read replies to and from people I follow. I don’t want to be bothered with everybody’s replies to everyone else. Most of the time they don’t make sense to me – such as “LOL! Very True!” or “Thank you for your sweet words.”

I find it quite annoying when I see someone use a “!” so that their replies are read by everyone, unless the reply has valulable information everyone can benefit from.
Twitter: @dutchhillgirl
Gabe said,

Thanks Annie,

You bring up a good point. I hope people wouldn’t use it for a simple response that has no value. I must admit I sometimes use them to thank people in front of a larger audience.

For some reason Twitter had said that this is a technical issue that was difficult to solve – keeping it the way it was where people could choose whether or not they wanted to see these tweets. From what I hear they do plan to readdress it in the future.