In my previous blog, I wrote about FollowFriday, some of the reasons why it started, and the many ways that Twitter users can participate in it.
I am writing this blog because I still see a lot of people doing it WRONG. I did not even find out that people were participating in FollowFriday incorrectly until I went to their profiles and saw the FollowFriday recommendations they tweeted to their followers.
Or tried to. One of the Tweeps whose profile I visited had tweet after tweet of her followers during one FollowFriday. She sent out about 60 unique tweets with 8-11 user names each, and all of them ended with the shorter FollowFriday hashtag, #FF. Who ended up seeing her FollowFriday tweets the moment she posted them? Unfortunately, only she did, as well as the users mentioned in the tweet, IF they are online at the time.
What mistake did she make? In each of her FollowFriday tweets, the beginning of the tweet was a user name of her follower. According to Twitter, “[a]n @reply is any Twitter update that begins with @username.” Therefore, Twitter treated all of her FollowFriday tweets as a reply for the very first user in each tweet. How about the rest of the users in the tweet? Twitter handles the tweet as a “mention”, which is “any Twitter update that contains @username in the body of the tweet.”
Why is it important to know the difference between replies and mentions? Replies do not show up on the public timeline or home timeline, generally speaking, while mentions do. Let’s look at the following hypothetical tweet.
@tonystevens4, @TweetSmarter, @FlowerBlossoms, @ParachuteGuy, @snopes, @NikiConnor, @ScienceChannel, @FailBlog, @shinng #ff
The tweet begins immediately with the user name, @tonystevens4, so Twitter treats the tweet as a reply and will not show up in the public timeline. However, people can see replies in their home timeline if, and only if, they are following both the sender and recipient of the tweet. How would that look like?
From my home timeline:
tonystevens4 @NikiConnor Good morning, Niki!
NikiConnor @tonystevens4 Good morning, Tony!
Going back to the hypothetical tweet, each of the users in the tweet, including @tonystevens4, would find this tweet in their own mentions feed and nowhere else. We can modify the tweet a few ways in order for it to show up in the home timeline and public timeline. For example, we can add the hashtag, #FollowFriday, in front of the tweet,
or we can add a period or forward slash:
.@tonystevens4, @TweetSmarter, @FlowerBlossoms, @ParachuteGuy, @snopes, @NikiConnor, @ScienceChannel, @FailBlog, @shinng #ff
/@tonystevens4, @TweetSmarter, @FlowerBlossoms, @ParachuteGuy, @snopes, @NikiConnor, @ScienceChannel, @FailBlog, @shinng #ff
What does this show? The mechanism for replies is very specific, but making a tweet appear in the home and public timelines is variable and not standardized. Indeed, as long as the beginning of the tweet does not begin with @username, the tweet will appear in the home and public timelines.
What, then, can the Tweep with the 60 unique, yet exclusive, FollowFriday tweets do in the future? As long as she does not start any of her FollowFriday tweets with @username, her recommendations will appear in her home timeline and the public timeline. If you have tens of thousands of followers, you do not want to make this FollowFriday mistake.
