Twitter Lingo 101: Tweet, Hash-Tag, Mention, Favorite, Retweet

Opening a new profile and posting from Twitter can be like learning an entirely new language. But don’t worry, we’ve translated the Twitter lingo for you and put together a list of the 5 most important items you need to know and how to use them. Here’s Twitter Lingo 101:

1. Tweet
   A tweet is the main way to communicate on Twitter. With 140 characters, you can convey what you’re thinking, share a photo of a fundraising event, post a link to a great piece of content you just created, or spread the word with a video of your wonderful volunteers.Here’s an example of a tweet that we published recently:

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   By default, all tweets are public. However, only those who follow you on Twitter will see them on their home screen. But others can find them through other methods such as hashtags or retweets (we’ll talk about these below) and given that there are about 5,700 tweets sent per second, Twitter users tend to use methods other than their home screen to find and engage with the best tweets!

2. Hashtag
   A hashtag, in its purest definition, is a word with the pound or number sign in front of it. This is Twitter’s method of grouping tweets of a similar topic together. Every hashtag that’s posted in a tweet is a link. Click on it and you’ll see all related tweets to that topic!You can also search for topics using a hashtag in the search bar. For example, if you were interested in reading tweets about donations, you could search for “#donations”. Or if you’re looking for tips on non profit social media, you might search for “#nonprofit #socialmedia”. (These two are split up because #nonprofitsocialmedia is not a commonly used hashtag. But you would have discovered that if you tried to search it!)

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   Including hashtags in your tweets will make them much easier to find. But make sure to search for the hashtag first to make sure you’re using one that searched often enough that you’ll actually be found! (Not sure what the best hashtag to use is? Consider trying Fides Social – a product that will help you find the best one for your current tweet!)

3. Mention
   A mention is a way to interact directly with others on Twitter. After all, the purpose of Twitter is really to have conversations and not just speak at your followers. Mentions are created by using the “@” symbol in front of a Twitter handle. For example, if we were creating a tweet and wanted to mention one of our clients, The Museum, we would type “@THEMUSEUM”.

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   The Museum would receive a notification that we mentioned them so they can respond appropriately. So that means that it’s important for you to check for your mentions too! Just go to the Connect tab on Twitter to see all your mentions, favorites, and retweets.

4. Favorite
   Twitter users “favorite” tweets when they find a tweet that they think is valuable and want to refer to it again later. You can favourite a tweet to keep for later by clicking “favorite” on any tweet in Twitter. Refer back to it by navigating to “Me”, and “Favorites” on the left-hand side. When someone favorites a tweet, this action is only visible to the ‘favoriter’, the account that originally published the tweet, and anyone mentioned in the tweet.

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5. Retweet
   A retweet occurs when someone else views a tweet you’ve published and wants to share it with their network too. There are two types of retweets: (1) a direct retweet and (2) a quoted retweet. A direct retweet occurs by clicking the “retweet” button below a tweet on Twitter. The exact tweet, including the profile picture of the original author is copied and pasted on to the ‘retweeters’ own tweet list. In our list of tweets below, you can see that we did a direct retweet of OVCN’s tweet.

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   A quoted retweet occurs when a user wants to add additional comments to a tweet that someone else composed. It is Twitter etiquette to always acknowledge where the tweet came from. Here “RT” stands for retweet and the handle mentioned (us, in this case!) is the original publisher of this tweet.

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Now that’s a lot to take in, so take it step-by-step! Start by creating a simple tweet with text only and work your way up to including popular hashtags, mentioning relevant Twitter users, and retweeting other people’s content. And don’t forget to check for other users who are mentioning you, or retweeting and favoriting your content.

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