I was at a presentation on Thursday at the Yaletown Rotary Club being given by Kemp Edmonds (@KempEdmonds), a social media educator at BCIT. One of the topics he discussed was cross-posting on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking web sites. Cross-posting – posting the same information on multiple sites at once – makes it easier to keep all your social media profile up to date, but there are also potential downfalls.

Kemp discussed the idea that using tags and symbols in your messages – particularly those employed by seasoned Twitter users – on sites where they’re not typically used can result in alienation of the audience on other sites. In this case, cross-posting would negate your efforts to reach more audience in less time.

Have you ever seen an @ or # symbol in someone’s Facebook or LinkedIn status? What does RT mean anyway? Kemp had a great point in stating that not everyone is familiar with these symbols and abbreviations. Furthermore, no one likes to feel like they’re out of the loop. So, in the interest of education, let’s examine what these cryptic Twitter symbols and terms mean:

TWEET OR (less commonly) TWIT
A message sent via Twitter, consisting of 140 characters or less.

@ OR @USERNAME
In the Twitter world, the @ symbol precedes a person’s Twitter username. The @username of a person is used anytime you want to send a public message to a specific user or you want to reference that person in a Tweet. An @username can be used in a couple of ways, referred to as “mentions” or “@reply”.

EXAMPLE: @cfxcreative

MENTIONS
A “mention” is just that – an instance in which someone makes reference to your @username within their tweet, usually to attribute content to you or to share your Twitter profile with others. Keeping watch on mentions of your @username is the easiest way to monitor when someone is talking about you on Twitter.

EXAMPLE: Just read an interesting blog post by @cfxcreative

@REPLIES
An “@reply” is when someone sends a public tweet specifically addressed to you. In this case, the @username will appear at the very beginning of the tweet. @replies are used to either initiate a question or conversation with a specific user or to reply to or comment on something that user has tweeted.

EXAMPLE: @cfxcreative Just read your newest blog post. Great info!

DIRECT MESSAGES
Different from an @reply is a “direct message” or DM. These types of messages are private messages exchanged between users on Twitter. In order to send a DM to someone, you have to be following them and they also need to be following you. This prevents users from using direct messages as a way to spam others. The syntax of a DM is a little different than using an @username, as the @ symbol is not included. In this case, the tweet begins with a lowercase letter D and a space, then the username, sans @ symbol.

EXAMPLE: d cfxcreative Can you forward the link to the site we discussed at our meeting earlier?

# OR HASHTAG
You may have seen someone cross-post a message on Twitter and Facebook that has words with the # symbol in front of them. In the case of Twitter, the # symbol is placed before a word or phrase that is intended to be used like a keyword within the tweet. Hashtags make it easy for users to search for tweets that mention specific topics or keywords. Many people set up automatic searches for specific hashtags to monitor conversations on that topic without performing a manual search each time they log in.

EXAMPLE: Just read a great blog post from @cfxcreative on #business in #vancouver.

Twitter etiquette dictates that a maximum of one or two hashtags be used in any tweet. This ensures that the hashtags that are included in a message mark it for the most relevant category for its content. In the example above, anyone searching on the terms “business” or “vancouver” would likely find this tweet in their search results.

RT OR RE-TWEETS
Think of re-tweets as the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email. Let’s say you see a tweet with a link to an article you think would be interesting or useful to your Twitter followers. This is when you would re-tweet a message posted on Twitter by another user. For re-tweets – aka RTs – the letters RT appear before the @username of the original sender, followed by the content of their message. You typically want to keep the message as close to its original form as possible. However, adding a short comment before the RT or shortening the original message to fit within the 140 character limit are acceptable edits.

EXAMPLE: Great info here, folks! RT @cfxcreative Check our new blog post on the Value of Design.

URL SHORTENERS
If you’ve ever seen a weird-looking URL in a Twitter or Facebook message that looks something like this:
http://ht.ly/1Oul7 you may be wondering whether or not it’s a legitimate link or to what site the poster is sending you. Given the 140-character size limit on tweets, you want to save as many of those characters as possible for your actual message. URLs can be quite long, so there are a number of sites – www.bit.ly, www.tinyurl.com and tons of others – that offer URL shortening services. On these sites – and on Twitter – you can paste in your original URL and the site will shrink it down to a reasonable length for use in a tweet.

EXAMPLE: http://cfxcreative.com/blog/2009/09/the-value-of-design/ becomes http://ht.ly/1Oul7 after shortening.

While there’s always more to learn as social media sites and tools grow and evolve, here’s hoping that you’re at least a little better equipped to take on the world of Twitter – or at least understand what all those @ and # symbols are doing in your friends’ Facebook and LinkedIn status updates.