Twitter is brilliant but at the same time it can be v-e-r-y frustrating! So much to learn and so many 'mistakes' to make, whether you are newbie or an old hand.
But to be fair, Twitter themselves don't make it any easier, with their 'rules' and constant evolution (they call it improvements!) of their platform. Heck, things can never stay the same in 'social land' for more than 5 minutes can they?
Anyway, I just wanted to highlight four of these things about Twitter that you may not be aware of, but are important to understand when using it. Here they are:
- Twitter stops you from seeing some tweets. This happens when people are having a conversation on Twitter - using the @twittername at the start of the tweet. When a tweet begins with @twittername Twitter interperates this as a Reply. Only those following both you and the person you mention will see the tweet in their timeline. When you mention someone using their @twittername in the body of your tweet, everyone can see it. Thanks Katharine Robinson for that gem.
- You get more clicks on a link depending on where you place it in a tweet. This sounds strange when the message is only a maximum of 140 characters, doesn't it? Well some research by Dan Zarella has shown that putting the link 25% of the way through the tweet, gives you the best chance for a click on it! Only way to see if it true, is to test this yourself!
- You won't see all your re-tweets in your timeline. This gets a lot of people confused and equally frustrated, as it doesn't allow them to see who has been sharing their tweets, and therefore not allowing them to engage with them directly.
It is to do with the 'official' re-tweet link on Twitter.com and on the official Twitter apps. Once someone has re-tweeted your tweet having used the 'official' Twitter.com (or app), each time someone else re-tweets it, you won't see it. Twitter won't show it in in your timeline again. Fortunately if you use a third party Twitter application like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, CoTweet etc (both desktop and mobile versions) you have the option of changing the style of re-tweet, therefore allowing everyone to see them in their timelines. - Twitter controls who sees your tweets. No big surprise here is there? I mean Google and Bing do it every day. It is to do with Twitter Search - search.twitter.com - they have their own little algorithm that 'scores' your tweets and ranks them in the search results (that is if they are not overloaded with the billions of tweets they have in their data set!) So when you are searching on Twitter search, make sure you do multiple searches around the same search queries, to find what you are looking for (and don't forget searching relevant hashtags).
For all the above Twitter 'issues' there are work rounds, and as always with social media, people are happy to share them. If you do have 'strange' things happen on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc it is always worth asking people in social land - someone will have the answer........somewhere!
And of course if you are not following me on Twitter, why not start today :-)
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