Digital and Social

Easy Twitter Reply Tip

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Here's an easy Twitter reply tip for beginners. You’ve probably noticed you’re not seeing any tweets beginning with @username in your home stream.

Someone recently asked me why some of my tweets begin with .@username instead of the standard @username on twitter. You’ve probably also noticed you’re not seeing any tweets beginning with @username in your home stream. This is a subtle change in Twitter behaviour.

I’ll try to explain below.

@username is used to mention someone in your tweet.

When used the following happens:

  1. The tweet appears on your home stream feed and of those following you
  2. The tweet appears on the home stream feed of @username
  3. The tweet appears in the mentions folder of @username

However, if you’re replying (where the @username appears first) Twitter reacts differently to this and considers this a reply as opposed to a mention. Thus, Twitter assumes you’re writing directly to the person

 

  1. The tweet appears on your home stream
  2. The tweet does not appear on the home streams of those following you
  3. The tweet appears on the home stream feed of @username
  4. The tweet appears in the mentions folder of @username

The exception to this is if your follower also follows the account in the @username

That sucks! What this means is that any replies made by you (where the @username appears first) are not seen by your followers at all.

But what if I want them to see my replies?

There are situations where you’d want a reply to be visible to your community of followers as well. If someone has asked you a question, and you want to reply with your comments, but would like to initiate your follower base as well in the conversation, you would have to retweet the original tweet and then reply to the tweet in context by adding the @username anywhere else but the beginning of the tweet.

Or you could just add any character before the @username. In the case below, a period is used.

 

So if you tweet beginning with .@username instead of @username. This ensures that your follower base also sees the reply on their individual home stream. Nifty, huh?

Why the period? Why not other characters? You can user other characters not reserved for any special function with twitter.

But the period is the least intrusive, I think.