Twitter Tutorial: @Replies and @Mentions

Without knowing it she was restricting the number of people that saw the post because of the structure of her tweet. She’s an extremely smart person, is a geek, yet didn’t know about the following feature.

I was amazed that she didn’t know how it worked but after thinking about it I wasn’t surprised since Twitter is touted as easy to use but there are some hidden features that affect usage that take some digging (or someone teaching you) to find out about.

@Replies

Back in May of 2009 Twitter made an update the functionality of the @reply. An @reply is a tweet that has a person’s Twitter name at the front of the tweet (just like the structure I displayed above). Users had actually invented the use of the mentioning structure to denote the mention of another user in the system so that people would know they were talking about another Twitter user. Twitter added the feature that linked a user’s name when it was behind the @ sign.

The following is taken from the Twitter support article “What are @replies and mentions?”

• People will only see replies in their Home timeline if they are following both the sender and recipient of the update.
• People will see mentions in their timeline even if they don’t follow the person mentioned – as long as they follow the sender, they’ll see the mention in their timeline (It’s treated like a regular Tweet.)
• People with protected accounts cannot send replies to people who aren’t following them, and mentions won’t be seen by non-followers either.
• If someone sends you a reply and you are not following the user, the reply will not appear on your Home timeline. Instead, the reply will appear in your Mentions timeline.
• Replies will always have “in reply to” listed next to their timestamp. If a Tweet doesn’t have this, it’s a mention.

Assuming you don’t have a protected account here is the breakdown of the @reply structure:

@Mentions

Mentions are a little bit simpler to understand. Technically @replies are @mentions that just happened to be placed at the beginning of a tweet. Both will show up in your replies area. The only difference is that the people who are following just them can also see the tweet that mentions you instead of just the people that follow both of you.

Back to the original issue. I contacted her asking her if she knew that putting my @name at the beginning of her tweet meant that only the people that followed both of us would see it and while I appreciated the gesture I wanted to make sure that she knew the limits that her format imposed.