First, imagine a fictional family where everyone follows each other on Twitter: @Mom, @Dad, @Brother and @Sister.
1. The basics
Rule #1: A person must follow you before you can DM them. If @Mom and @Dad (fictional example names) want to write completely privately so no one will see what they write but each other, they have to DM each other.
Rule #2: Anytime you put an @someone anywhere in a tweet, it will be sent to that @someone, regardless of whether they follow you or not.
2. Creating tweets only your “family” can see
But what if @Mom and @Dad want to write tweets that @Sister and @Brother can both see, but no one else can see? Then they tweet like this:
@Dad Message goes here -or- @Mom Message goes here
So, rule #3 is: When you start your message with @someone, the message will only be sent to @someone and the people that follow both you and @someone. Of course, anyone who follows both @Mom and @Dad will see these tweets, but for the purposes of our example let’s assume only @Brother and @Sister both follow @Mom and @Dad.
3. Sharing “family” tweets with everyone
So what happens when you put @someone after the beginning of your tweet? It is sent to all your followers, and to @someone. It’s just a regular tweet, delivered to all your followers. Why do that? It’s a way to share the conversation you’re having with @someone with ALL your followers. If you’re just saying something directly to them that you want everyone to see, it’s common to write
.@someone message goes here
If you’re just saying something about them you want them and all your followers to see, you’d tweet something like this:
So like I was saying to @someone the other day…
But anything you put before you write @someone will have the same effect. So both of these messages are sent to all your followers and to @someone. It’s just common to use a period “.” if you’re talking to them directly, but you want everyone to see it.
4. How Tweets are viewed, and how to make it work the way you want
Twitter applications and the Twitter website provide several ways to see your tweets. One way, called @mentions has a problem you might want to work around. This is typically how most interfaces show you tweets “sent” to you. The problem is that @mentions are a list of every tweet that has your @username in it. If lots of people you don’t want to hear from start writing tweets with your @username in them, it can be overwhelming. This happens to popular/celebrity Twitter users, and also to people who get retweeted a lot. What to do? Simple: add a search for message sent just to you to your favorite interface. The Twitter search terms for messages that start out with @TweetSmarter, for example, is:
to:TweetSmarter
Since the web interface will save searches for you, I have this one saved: a search for messages sent just to me.Here’s how that works:
5. Viewing conversations
Twitter does notice when you click “reply” on any interface instead of just typing in a user’s twitter name. It then will show you both your “conversation” by making all tweets replied to available for viewing on some interfaces, by clicking “view conversation” below the tweet. Thanks to @WalterKort for reminding me of this feature 
6. The exceptions
The exceptions are mainly just ways people can see everything you tweet, regardless of how you are using @’s. “Who sees a tweet?” usually means “When I tweet something, who does Twitter send it to?”
Exception #1:
People can also see your tweets by going directly to your Twitter page. Everything you tweet is shown there to everyone (except your DMs). If you don’t want that, you have to make your tweets private. The only time anyone will visit your Twitter page in most cases is the first time they hear about you. Then they’ll just check out your page to see if you are the kind of person they want to follow.
Exception #2:
People can search for tweets, and all your tweets (except your DMs) that match what is being searched for will show up. So your tweets are more public than you might realize, especially because of…
Exception #3:
Some applications show your followers what you tweet by using Twitter’s search features. That means they’ll see everything you tweet (except your DMs). Most applications don’t work this way though.
Exception #4:
This appears to no longer be the case. How it used to work:
When you clicked a “Reply” link in any interface, it writes the first part of the tweet for you, such as
@someone
…then you simply add what you want to say to @someone and everything works normally. But what happens if you don’t click anything and just type (or cut and paste in)
@someone
It looks exactly the same, doesn’t it? But Twitter could originally tell if you clicked a “Reply” link or not, and the rules only applied if you clicked the link. If you typed or cut and pasted the @someone in, your tweet was shown to everyone, same as if you used the .@someone trick.
{ 15 comments… read them below or add one }
Great article and thanks for posting this.
Thanks for the tip re searching from replies.
Re “exception 4″….are you saying that this is still the case or not? It’s certainly big news to me that clicking “reply” (in the interface) is any different to simply starting with the @username
@Joel_Hughes
My tests show it doesn’t work that way anymore. When Twitter first started changing how @ replies worked, they made more than one change on more than one date. It looks like they dropped this feature.
They originally made the change because everything used to be public all the time: you saw ALL the tweets of ALL your followers regardless of @usernames in the tweets. When they made tweets starting with “@…” NOT show up, people complained. So they decided if you clicked a reply link, the tweet would NOT be shown to everyone, but if you simply pasted in an @username, everyone WOULD still see it.
Almost no one realized they had made tweets work two ways like this, and many of the few that did notice the change were confused. So I think Twitter dropped the feature—without ever mentioning that it was being dropped—because no one knew about the feature anyway! A lot of changes were happening at the same time, and this one flew over most people’s heads, especially as you could never tell the difference by how the tweet looked.
Of course, as always, the users came up with the solution: Put some other character in front of the “@…” if you want everyone to see the tweet, hence the trick to start with “.@…”
hmmz I though the only difference by clicking reply or typing in @username yourself is Twitter knows on which tweet you replied.
You can see it in your twitterstream on the web (or in any other interface) at the bottom of the replied tweet. “about ## hours ago via web in reply to username”. Clicking on the link “in reply to username” will bring you to original tweet.
Quite handy if you want to know were some conversations are about…;)
Excellent point, Walter! I knew of that (in fact rely on it) but forgot to mention it. Have updated the post and credited you
I was not aware of the .@ convention
Good to know I did notice that I was not able to see replies from the tweeps I follow in my timeline, maybe there’s a twitter app which has an option to show these.
Have you tried googling the Twitter name then selecting “recent activity” ?
I’m so confused! Just yesterday I learned where I could see my @mentions. Now your talking conversations, timelines, cut and paste @someones, I’m still lost, but I guess I’m getting by. Thanks anyway
Keep it simple. Cut and paste means the same thing as typing in by hand, generally. Your timeline is simply all your tweets. The timeline of your followers is simply all their tweets. And a conversation is just a tweet (or a few) that someone responded to.
Thanks for the very useful blog!
I have one question: Is there an app or a way on twitter.com to have twitter prepopulate or suggest names when you start an @mention? For example, if I start to type an email to someone whose name starts with “D”, my email will offer me a drop menu to select which one I want and I am not relying on my memory to manually type (or have to look up) an email address each time.
If I want to @mention someone on twitter, is there a way to have his/her twitter handle pop up without my having to search it out if I can’t recall it exactly?
I hope I am being clear in phrasing my question. Thanks!
Many Twitter apps (such as Hootsuite) do have that feature. I use Hootsuite on the web and find that feature VERY helpful.
Thank you! I usually use TweetDeck because I manage multiple twitter accounts. Perhaps I will look into HootSuite, though. I appreciate your help!
Mel, you can activate auto-population of user names in Tweetdeck; go to the little wrench tool in the corner to see your options. VERY useful; Seesmic does it, but it seems only for people you’ve tweeted with recently.
Good article, Dave. I have one person I followed who insisted on thanking everyone that followed her with a “Thanks for following me @someone, [insert trite signoff here]” and it drove me mad; could be dozens of them in sequence #fail.
One thing to mention is that if you tweet within a community where lots of conversations are going on, you might be missing out if you don’t follow both people conversing, as you won’t see those exchanges unless they are RT’d or include someone you do follow. Cruising the profiles of some of your favorite people to see who that are talking to can be helpful in rounding out your following list.
Great tips, Laura!
I tried to do make a reply @ my followers then I was unfollowed by one follower.. I must have done something that wasn’t accurate
I wouldn’t worry too much about it.
Lots of accounts follow then unfollow later. They’re just trying to make themselves look more popular
People also follow just to check others out, then later decide if their tweets are interesting enough to them. Twitter has more unfollowing than any other social network, I think.
It’s probably not anything you did.
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