Who Sees Your Tweets?
I got involved in a tweet conversation today which once reminded me how few people understand who sees your tweets. So much so that I decided to put pen to paper (metaphorically speaking). Ok, with a normal (i.e. public, not private) Twitter account the following applies: 1) Your followers will 'see' (in their tweetstream) any of your 'normal' tweets. 2) Your followers will NOT see your direct messages (DMs). These are only visible to you and the recipient. 3) Your followers will ONLY see your replies if they too are following the person being replied to. Ok, that's a mouthful, let's try an example. Let's say @mike, @steve, @jenny and @frank are following me. If I reply (which I do by starting a tweet with a username) to @steve then ONLY @mike will see that tweet in their tweetstream as he DOES follow @steve (and the rest do not). Geddit? The last one does catch a lot of people out. The last point is the whole reason why (old style) RT works - by changing a tweet from a "reply" to a "mention", which we do by prefixing it with the adhoc characters RT (btw these characters are not particularly significant to Twitter), you allow the tweet to be visible to all your followers. You may also see some tweets which are prefixed with a full stop (e.g. ".@steve this was a reply and now its a mention") - this achieves the same as a RT - all your followers will see it (without the "." only @steve and your followers who also follow @steve would see it). A few points though:
A) Twitter USED to offer the facility to see all of someone's replies (irrespective of whether you followed the recipient or not) but that was withdrawn a long long time ago. ii) Occasionally I have seen replies in my time line where I do NOT follow the recipient. I can only assume this is an intermittent bug or, perhaps, is related to the new Twitter Streaming API. Perhaps the optioned discussed above is coming back? iii) All public tweets are seachable etc so people might be reading your tweets via a keyword search rather than as a direct follower. Phew! Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
A) Twitter USED to offer the facility to see all of someone's replies (irrespective of whether you followed the recipient or not) but that was withdrawn a long long time ago. ii) Occasionally I have seen replies in my time line where I do NOT follow the recipient. I can only assume this is an intermittent bug or, perhaps, is related to the new Twitter Streaming API. Perhaps the optioned discussed above is coming back? iii) All public tweets are seachable etc so people might be reading your tweets via a keyword search rather than as a direct follower. Phew! Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
