Anatomy and life cycle of a tweet. Know your @'s from your #elbow

At first twitter tweets seems like a very strange language filled with @'s, #'s, RT's and tinyURL's. I found it terribly daunting at first.

Hopefully I'll be able to help you understand your @'s from your elbows.

Twitter has quite a few commands that can be used with your tweets. Most were created by Twitter but a few user generated commands crept in. I'll only be discussing the ones most commonly used to communicate & give credit.

Anatomy of a tweet

So lets have a look at the typical life cycle of a tweet. Consider the following tweet:

RT @skok RT @socialpond Free Cloud Computing Adoption Survey Slideshow http://ow.ly/1b6UZ SCR @timpickard  #mimecast #survey

This particular tweet has been around the block a few times. So lets break it up and follow it's life cycle.

Step 1:

timpickard Uploads a slideshow onto linkedin

Step 2:

socialpond (me) stumbles across it via linkedin updates (google, rss etc.). I decide its a great slideshow and I feel that my twitter followers might find it interesting so I construct the following tweet:

Free Cloud Computing Adoption Survey Slideshow http://ow.ly/1b6UZ SCR @timpickard 

You will notice I used SCR,  @timpickard and ow.ly,  

• SCR allows me to give credit to timpickard (his twitter account is listed on his linkedin profile).
• The '@' allows the tweet to appear in timpickard's twitter feed and makes him aware I tweeted his link.
• ow.ly is a URL shortening service used by hootsuite, you can use any URL shortening service, personally I use hootsuite as it allows a great range of tracking and reporting. Using the URL shortening service has change the original URL from :http://www.linkedin.com/osview/canvas?_ch_page_id=2&_ch_panel_id=3&_ch_app_id=14109190&_applicationId=1200&appParams={%22from%22%3A%22profile_view%22%2C%22view%22%3A%22canvas%22%2C%22page%22%3A%22slideview%22%2C%22slideshow_id%22%3A%223272407%22}&_ownerId=840549&completeUrlHash=THa1. To: http://ow.ly/1b6UZ 

Step 3:

skok who is a follower of socialpond sees the tweet, views the slideshow and decides to retweet it, however she feels that the tweet is related to "mimecast" so she adds a #mimecast:

RT @socialpond Free Cloud Computing Adoption Survey Slideshow http://ow.ly/1b6UZ SCR @timpickard  #mimecast

skok added RT and # tags:

• RT is used to acknowledge the re-use of socialpond's tweet, as before the @ causes the retweet to be displayed in socialpond's twitter feed.
  
• # is used to categorize and tag tweets. This allows people searching for a specific term to find the tweet, even if the term is not specifically used in the tweet.

Step 4

One of skok's followers sees her retweeting socialpond's tweet and retweets it to his followers, giving credit to both skok and socialpond, he also feels the tweet relates to "survey" and adds #survey:

RT @skok RT @socialpond Free Cloud Computing Adoption Survey Slideshow http://ow.ly/1b6UZ SCR @timpickard  #mimecast #survey

If you reread the original tweet it no longer looks so strange or difficult to read.

140 limit and now what?

However this process is not scalable due to the 140 character limit of twitter. You will eventually be faced with a decision of what to remove.

1. Removing the original author 'timpickard' will be the first step. Anyone clicking on the link will be directed to content he created.
2. Try condensing the words, replace 'for' with '4', 'You' with 'U' etc.
3. Remove some of the #tags in the above example I would remove both tags if need be.
4. Remove the retweets, only crediting the last person to retweet it.

  
With careful consideration, credit and tagging your tweets can relive in others feed.