Meta Tweeting: The Thread About Threads
Published in
2 min readFeb 14, 2017
- Twitter threads can be very confusing, but with few tricks we can make our conversations a bit easier to follow:
- For tweetstorm formatting, @WriteRack makes it seamless. Compose directly or paste into their interface, it does the rest. Make sure you test the spacing a few times before posting.
- To thread your tweets manually, just post the new tweet as a reply to the previous tweet. Don’t forget to remove the tags.
- When replying, if your tweet begins with anything but @[name], all of your followers will see it. You can use a dot or put the tags somewhere else in the tweet
- If your reply begins with @[name], your followers will see it in your TL but it will be under the “replies” tab on your profile page
- To see what a tweet is referring to, click the time stamp. To avoid confusion, be sure to tag the right poster & reply to the right tweet
- If you quotetweet, the original poster will see it but won’t see the interactions. It’s good form to tag them, since it is their tweet
- If you have a poster muted but want to see their side of a conversation, just follow them, then unfollow to mute them again
- Twitter used to let you block right from the profile popup, but now you have to click to the page to block or mute. Annoying. @Support
- Threads where OP quotetweets their previous tweet are hard to follow and tangential replies aren’t displayed at all
- Manual quotetweets, where OP tweets someone else’s tweet in quotations, are annoying & disrupt the conversation
- Try to space your tweets so they make sense on their own. Avoid incomplete thoughts and sentence fragments if possible
- And for the love of Pete, please number your tweets. Once you get RT’d out of order your thread becomes useless, impossible to follow
- Indicate that your thread has ended with an x [11/x] or [end] or anything else that makes it clear
- If your thread gets broken or you need to add to it, indicate so in a reply to the last threaded tweet and paste your new tweet in the reply
- Even if you already know this stuff, please realize many don’t. More standardization will make thing flow more smoothly for all of us.
- Questions? Just ask. If anyone has other tips, tweet me or leave me a comment.
More:
Not Choosing is Still a Decision