Anatomy of A Tweet

Twitter is at the forefront of modern social networking.


Ergo, it is a crucial tool for anyone in a public position, or just wants everyone to know that they just did their laundry.

Twitter serves as a sort of self-advertisement, and as such, a successful tweet is one that garners the largest number of reads. Ideally, people would read things you post, thus garnering yourself exposure.

This is this basic structure:

@Someone's_Username TEXT TEXT TEXT #PopularConnection *Link*

These components don't necessarily have to be in that order, but it's not a bad standard to use. A tweet allows only 140 characters to be used, so everything must be condensed.

Let's start with the @. An @Username will notify Username that you just included them in a tweet. Only that person will be notified of this, and can be seen as a political move. If you include others in your tweets, they might be brought to include you in theirs. If you are mentioned in other people's tweets, all of THEIR followers will be presented with a link to your account. This could significantly increase your following.

Next comes the hashtag, or #. This is a really interesting feature of Twitter, as at any giving moment the ten most popular hashtags are featured. This means that if a thousand people include #dinosaurs, there might appear a temporary dinosaur category, as so many people are tweeting about dinos. This can be used to the tweeters advantage, if you hashtag to popular (and relevant!) categories, as doing so increases the chances that somebody might stumble upon a tweet, and like it.

A truly successful tweet will integrate these components. Ex: @SomeScientist Colliding subatomic particles in the #LargeHadronCollider tonight! *link to page on the LHC*

This tweet would do a good job of garnering views. Now what's the point of getting viewers in the first place? Suppose you need people to donate money to a cause. The link provided could send readers to a page where they can easily donate. The possibilities are endless.

Twitter changes the evolution of language in a new and unforeseen way. Such writing is encouraged to be short and condensed, sometimes at the expense of proper grammar and/or spelling conventions. Similarly as in "text speak" ideas are forced to be expressed artificially short spaces. 

 The ability to @ or # doesn't exactly have much potential to change words or grammar. But, it changes the way language is used, as people are looking for ways to integrate links to outside information, and to further categorize information in as efficient a way as possible without disrupting the flow of a sentence.