The great thing about social networks is the ‘social’ part in it. If you use social networks to learn and engage with others that like to learn and exchange knowledge nice things can happen. Two weeks ago me and my colleagues at Solidaridad received a message that a blog was interested in posting a story on our ‘Good Gold’-campaign. That’s always great news as we have no budget and the campaign does very well on free publicity. This time it wasn’t just the free publicity, it was also a free lesson in Twitter.
Who can view my tweets?
The ‘Good Gold’-campaign raises awareness among jewellers and the general public about the issues that the gold mining industry faces and the solutions that are available to work on more responsible gold mining practises. The blog that wrote about our campaign was part of a new webshop in jewellery. Since we always try to acknowledge those that write about our campaign we sent reply to their Twitter account.
We receive an email back. “Thanks for the reply on Twitter but could you please do it again so everyone who follows you can see it too?” Pardon? “Yes. We have only two followers sofar and if they were following you the maximum number of people who were able to view that message in their timeline would be three, us and our two followers”.
Ok.. That got me thinking. What if they were right and why shouldn’t they be? That would mean that a lot of great tweets where not shown to our followers at all. Including a lot of those 7,700+ tweets from my personal account. As I was doing my research to better understand what tweets are shown in other peoples timeline, it turned out that they were right.
If you wish that a tweet appears in the timeline of your followers always use a character befor the @-reply.
Examples
So, if you post:
@maartenvleeuwen that’s new to me
This message will be shown on your profile, will be listed at the @mentions tab in my account and will be visible to those who follow us both.
However if you would say
hi @maartenvleeuwen that’s new to me
That message will appear in all your followers timelines plus the above (@mentions tab my profile, your profile and those who follow us both).
Twitter’s help and support center explains it here: Types of Tweets and Where They Appear.
Here are some interesting articles about this topic:
http://www.thehappyaccident.net/who-can-see-my-tweets-a-case-for-wikipedia-brown/
http://mhawksey.tumblr.com/post/2653671602/who-can-see-your-reply-in-twitter
I have been using Twitter for two years I think and this came as a suprise to me. It was a great experience to learn something new 
So what do you think do you need to update the way you use Twitter or did you got it right the first time already?