Join the Party – Unprotect your Tweets

Posted by Gabe on January 22, 2010 under Social Media, Twitter | Be the First to Comment

Recently I wrote a post about the pros and cons of having your tweets protected in Twitter.  I don’t have a personal bias as to what you should do regarding this, as it is not my place. However, if your tweets are protected, I think there’s something else you should be aware of.

I received a direct message from one of my Twitter colleagues asking me to point her to my blog post about hash tags.  She was desperately trying to get involved in the recent tragedy in #Haiti.  I sent her to the post. She read it and told me it was great, but her tweets were not showing up in the search column, even though she was using the hash tag properly.  I asked her to call me so we could investigate.  Sure enough I went to her profile and she was doing it correctly.  She also noted to me that her friend was unable to retweet her posts.  I again went to her profile and couldn’t find the retweet button either.  “Maybe there is something wrong with your Twitter account” I told her.  These were words she did not want to hear.  Anyway, after a bit more investigating I noticed her tweets were protected.  Aaaahhh! Now that makes sense.  Why should your tweets show up in the public timeline if they are protected?  Twitter is working as it should in both cases.

However, I was able to retweet her posts in Tweetdeck with no problems.  And people using the Twitter interface, although they can’t use the native retweet function, they can certainly do it the old fashioned way by copying and pasting.  So again this proves that your tweets are not truly protected no matter what.

So be warned that if you do protect your tweets you will not have the opportunities everyone else has of getting retweeted and joining a conversation based on hash tags.