Social Media Tutorials 02: Messaging in Twitter
In this installment of social media tutorials I’d like to talk about messaging in Twitter.
Tweets
A basic message it called a tweet. It can be 140 characters long – that’s counting each letter, space, number, punctuation mark, and any other individual characters you use in your message.
However, you want to make your tweet shorter than 140 characters if you want people to retweet your post. I will explain why in a minute.
Retweets
But what is a retweet? A retweet is when someone else shares your post or you share someone else’s post. Retweets usually begin with RT@yourusernamegoeshere. The RT is short for retweet and lets everyone know that you are sharing someone else’s tweet. The username of the original poster is automatically included in the retweet – because it’s polite to credit the source of your post. I will talk about how to retweet after I discuss your other basic messaging options with twitter.
Crediting/Tagging People in Tweets
When you retweet a post, the username is automatically included in the post. But what if you type a new post and want to credit someone, or tag friends so they will be notified of the post?
The @ symbol is always included directly in front of a user name in a tweet because that adds a link to that person’s profile. To tag someone in a post type the @ symbol and include the username right after the @ sign. The username is all one word without spaces. It can be different from a person’s display name, so be sure to use the person’s one-word name after the @ symbol if you want to tag them.
When you tag someone in a post, they are notified of the tag. Also, when people click on the tag in your post, it will take them to the profile of the person you tagged. This is especially useful when crediting someone.
Tags are included in the 140 character limit, so you can’t tag everyone. It’s best to only tag people when you retweet or want them to be copied on a conversation.
Replies
Replying to a tweet is a lot like tagging someone. You can click the reply button on Twitter, and the @username will automatically appear at the beginning of a new tweet. This shows you are directing the tweet to that person. They will receive a notification that you mentioned them in a tweet. Replies link to the person’s profile just like tags, but replies always show the @username at the beginning of the tweet, and it you are copying or tagging someone on a tweet, those tags appear at the end of tweets. The reason for this is many aggregate programs can filter out @replies to uncluttered a feed, but they do this by filtering out every tweet the begins with @. So to summarize: reply @s are at the beginning of a tweet and tagging @s are at the end.
Direct Messages
Tweets are public and anyone can see them (unless you set your account to private – which I do not recommend because it limits some of the best marketing features of twitter). However if you need to send someone a private message or don’t want to clutter your page with lots of @replies, then you can send a direct message. These messages still are limited to 140 characters, but they are sent to the user’s inbox. Only you and the user sees direct messages.
Message Length for Easy Retweeting
Remember earlier I said that you don’t want to take up the full 140 characters for a tweet? Here’s why. If you are a writer who wants to build a following on twitter, you want people to retweet your posts. It makes good business sense. The more people see your tweets, the better the chance you connect with your target audience.
However if your posts are the full 140 characters when someone tries to retweet your post, they will need to eliminate some characters before they can retweet it. Wait? Why would they have trouble retweeting a post that was 140 characters? Because when you retweet, the original username is added to the beginning of the tweet.
For example, my username is robinaburrows, so when someone retweets my post RT @robinaburrows is added to the beginning of the tweet. That is 18 extra characters counting the spaces you want between the username and the tweet. So the longest tweet I can post is 122 characters if I want people to be able to retweet easily.
If your username is shorter you might need to reserve fewer characters for the retweet. But if your post is even one character over 140 when the RT @username is added, the person retweeting will have to edit your post before they can retweet. In many cases people would rather cancel retweeting than try to shorten your post to fit. So always make sure to leave enough empty space for retweets when you tweet.
Come back in 2 weeks for the next installment of my social media tutorial series – the ever elusive hashtags!
