Another nuance of Twitter has caught my attention. I’ve noticed many personal, and a lot of large, corporate accounts are putting a period in front of their tweets. Since each character is so valuable I knew there had to be a reason for the use of a period. Well, turns out, there is.

In May 2009 Twitter changed its rules. If you start a tweet with an “@“, only people who follow you AND that the person you’re tweeting two (both accounts) will see the tweet in their timelines. This can be a good thing, as starting a tweet with an @ symbol and the persons Twitter handle allows you to keep a public tweet a lot less public. It’s good when you are sending a tweet to someone and you don’t need the whole world to see it. For instance:

@jpbenson, I don’t have your email. I sent you mine on DM.

The downfall of using the @ symbol and twitter to send a tweet is that if you intended for the whole world to see it, now you’ve seriously cut down on the amount of people who will see it. If it’s a person you don’t know very well, then it may just be you and the other person seeing the tweet. You are missing out of potentially hundreds, if not thousands of sets of eyes.

You can always craft your tweet to start with a word (i.e. Hey, @Tweet_Brander!) or you can take the lazy but effective route but adding a period. For example:

.@Tweet_Brander, I loved your post today. (: Happy tweeting.

Simple tip, hope it helps!