I’m writing this post out of love, I promise. I used to be more discreet when I saw people and brands making this mistake on Twitter by DM’ing or emailing them to tell them what they were doing wrong and how to fix it, but this isn’t an easy issue to explain in 140 characters, so I’m writing a blog post to hopefully help everyone out.

When working with Aimee on gathering info for FanPlan.info, I opened The Underground Music Showcase’s (UMS for short) Twitter account. I noticed that many of their last tweets highlighting bands looked like this:

Do you see the issue?

They started the tweet with @ResidualKid.

Why is that so wrong?

Well when you start a tweet with an @mention, Twitter treats that as a conversation and only allows people who are following both accounts to see the tweet.

This is helpful to know when you want some people to see what you’re talking about but don’t want to inundate your followers with tweets.

But in this case, @TheUMS is trying to let people know how awesome @ResidualKid is (and trust me, they fucking rock!), but only 71 people saw that tweet!

Yes, I analyzed their followers and found the people who were following both. Only 71 out of @TheUMS‘ almost 7,000 followers saw that tweet. That’s .8% of their followers!

They could have easily changed the tweet so that it didn’t start with @ResidualKid OR just simply added a . in front of the tweet. That’s right folks, this all could have been avoided by adding a . to the tweet.

So now you know, and hopefully I will never have to tweet you a link to this blog post telling you why your tweet didn’t reach as many people.

Like I said, I wrote this post out of love. <3