How to Effectively Use Twitter Mentions and @replies For Marketing
As effective as Twitter is to build an audience, grow brand awareness and generate traffic and leads, this micro-blogging platform can be quite confusing and not that self explanatory.
Reading tweets from your Twitter newsfeed with all the Twitter symbols such as the @ sign and the hashtag sign can be quite hard.
So what does it all mean and how do you use them to improve your results?
An @ symbol in a tweet is always followed by someone’s username and can mean two different things.
An @ Twitter symbol anywhere within a tweet apart from the very beginning is also known as a “Twitter mention”. In other words, it’s a way for Twitter users to mention other users in their tweets.
For example, the following tweet: “I love the blog posts from @womensnetworkau” would be the equivalent of “I absolutely love the blog posts from Women’s Network Australia” and is known as a “mention”.
These tweets (Twitter mentions) only appear in the news feed of the person who actually published the tweets, the timeline of the person mentioned in the tweet (in the example above, it would appear in the news feed of Women’s Network Australia) and would also appear in the news feed of the followers of the person who published the tweet.
A Twitter Mention is powerful, as the more people mention your username, the more engaged they are with your brand, and the more exposure your brand receives for free.
For example, should a person who has 10,000 followers mention your username, it would mean that your brand can potentially be seen by 10,000 new people.
On the other hand, when an @ twitter symbol appears right at the start of a tweet, it is known as an “@reply” or “Twitter reply”.
For example, the tweet below would be considered a Twitter reply:
“@womensnetworkau I absolutely love your blog posts.”
These tweets (or @replies) only appear in the news feed of the person who actually published the tweets, the news feed of the person who was mentioned in the tweets, and the news feed of the people who follow both the author of the tweets and the person mentioned.
@Replies are used when a person wants to have a direct conversation on Twitter with the person mentioned. The more @replies received by a brand also means the more engaged people are with the brand.
Both Twitter mentions and @replies are very powerful, as not only do they show engagement with your brand, they also allow you to build relationships further with followers, as well as allow you to instantly know their sentiment (whether positive or negative) towards your content and therefore better understand and serve your audience while managing your reputation.
Remember, to dramatically increase Twitter mentions and @replies, you should mention users and start conversations on a regular basis as well as acknowledge those who engage with your brand.