To Re-Tweet or not Re-Tweet (Hash Tags perhaps!)

If you're a Twitter user, you'll already appreciate what a huge boon it can be for both research and information gathering, or even just finding like minded people.

I use Twitter a lot and recently hit a fairly significant milestone in the numbers of people who follow my tweets. One of the things I do occasionally, is to ask a specific question to the people who are following me. This is usually for guidance or recommendations on software applications, gadgets or pretty much anything. The answers that come back are always wide and varied but amazingly useful and extremely valuable. The answers come back to me in the form of @replies and I'm always of the opinion that those followers who see these replies directed to me, most likely also get some useful information.

Today I asked a question about a web service and received a dozen or so @replies with tips, suggestions and information all about the web service.

Excellent!

However, I received another @reply today from another follower saying:

This made me realise that not all my followers, see all the responses I get back to questions!

The reason for this is buried away deep inside a Twitter setting within your user account - you can control what @replies you can see! The options are:

As can be seen, the default setting is only see @replies from people you follow directed toward other people you follow. So if like me you have lots of followers and people you follow, the likelihood is that people won't be following the same people and @replies will be missed.

Now you can setup twitter to see all @replies but to be honest, this gets pretty noisy!

As a suggestion, I'd like to explore two aspects of Twitter that may provide a simple solution:

Within Twitter is the concept of re-tweeting or re-brodcasting any tweets to all your followers and this is supported in TweetDeck, my favourite Twitter client.

There is also the concept of using hash tags - you see them in tweets like this #dontest. This is a mechanism built into twitter to allow you to search for unique keywords or hash tags. We used this very effectively during the recent Liverpool Barcamp for which all tweets included the hash tag #bcliverpool

So what I propose to do is this:

Whenever I post a question that other people may be interested in, I'll include a unique hash tag for that question. I just sent out a test tweet asking people to reply to me with #dontest in the @reply. Click on the link and you'll see the type of response I got back!

If people catch on, it would be great if they could include the unique hash tag so people can search for the responses without me needing to retweet.

For any @replies I get that don't include the hash tag, I'll re-tweet them so everyone can see them but I'll also include the hash tag in the re-tweet.

I'll not re-tweet duplicate responses and will usually re-tweet the first complete one I receive e.g If I receive two duplicate responses but one has a link, I'll re-tweet the one with the link.

Now this may sound complicated but it's really not!

I just include a has tag in a question and if you reply to me, just include the same hash tag.

Plus it also saves me the bother of having to re-tweet every @reply I receive.

Plus it will prevent a lot of duplication for people who do see all @replies.


This might be a useful bit of twitter etiquette for people with large numbers of followers to adopt and would make twitter even more useful. That being said, please feel free to Digg and promote this idea to all twitter users to see if it has legs!

Let me know of any refinements or leave any comments in this blog post - or send me a tweet to @DonMcAllister and use the hash tag #SCO_0001

PS It may well be that others are already using hash tags in this way and I'm not taking any credit for the idea. Just seems an easy way to spread the twitter goodness!

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Comments

[Stefaan Lesage]

Great idea Don, as always :-)

Regards,

Stefaan

[Stefaan Lesage]

Oh, Don,

You'll have to change the link to the complete #dontest instead of just dontest. Otherwise I get a lot of stuff I don't understand :-)

Regards,

Stefaan

[DonMc]

Works for me!

Make sure you have your language setting in the search results page set to English and not all languages

[Stefaan Lesage]

That did the trick, though searching for #dontest only showed me the tweets with that specific tag in it :)

Thanks again,

Stefaan

[Dave Ragsdale]

Hi Don,

Actually, even if you set Twitter to see all @replies, you're going to miss responses. I have this setting on, and therefore I see all of your @replies to others even if I don't follow those other people. But I don't see @replies directed toward you unless I happen to be following the person who sent the reply (not very likely).

[DonMc]

Thanks Dave,

The more I think about it, hash tags seem the simplest way to go

[Ian]

Thanks, Don!

For some reason I was receiving no @replies and just went to the Replies tab to check for them. Now I'll get answer to peoples questions. It might lead to too many tweets, but you seem to manage following over a thousand people, so I'm sure I can manage!

Ian

[Loll9]

ever notice that one's own comments do not appear in a hash tag search, even when your tweets include the hash tag? I would like to see my own tweets in a hashtag search. Any advise?

[Jon Payne]

Thanks Don, that's really helpful... was getting confused with all the @s and #s!