Understanding and using the @ sign on Twitter

Today is a first of many Blogging Quick Tips. Sometimes, I like to share detailed  tutorials or posts (like yesterday’s tutorial on Passionfruit Ads) and sometimes it’s nice to have short tips you can quickly implement in your blogging strategy.

If you use Twitter, you already know that including the @ sign, followed by a user’s username, tags that person in your tweet. What you may not know is that where you place the handle dictates who sees your tweet. There are two different type of tweets using the @ sign: replies and mentions.

What is a Reply?

A reply is when your tweet starts with the username. Here is an example of a reply:

@blogambitions You’re so very welcome. Thank you for having an awesome blog! xoxo

— Deliberate Mom (@DeliberateMom) October 7, 2014

(Jennifer’s such a nice lady) Because this is a reply, it only shows up in the home feed to me, @DeliberateMom, and anyone that follows both of us. If you see a reply in your timeline, you can click on the tweet and it will show the details of the conversation. This is a great function for when you don’t want everyone to see your tweets or you don’t want to flood all of your readers feeds during Twittter chats.

What is a mention?

A mention is anytime you use  the @ sign in a Tweet. When the handle @username is used within the tweet, all of your followers can see the Tweet in their home feed. Here is an example of a mention:

With the help of Kristie’s @blogambitions blogpost http://t.co/21dO49hiyr I replaced Jetpack for Mailchimp #wordpress pic.twitter.com/NcQTedSKhG — Archana Haarnack (@iArchana) September 27, 2014

Everyone in Archana’s Twitter feed was able to see that tweet (thanks!).

Hopefully this quick tip helps you use Twitter more efficiently. I’m curious: how do you use the @ sign?

 Sources:

https://blog.twitter.com/2008/how-replies-work-twitter-and-how-they-might
https://support.twitter.com/articles/14023-what-are-replies-and-mentions