Anatomy of a tweet – Introduction to twitter part 1
This week’s post is about twitter, not about how to use it, when to use it, or even whether to use it. Instead this post hopes to demystify the anatomy of a tweet. Below is an example of a tweet, the essential features are labelled and explained. Further emails which will dig deeper into twitter will follow and explain how useful twitter is a tool in the academic armoury.
In this first example the key information is the image itself. There is a beautiful image of Childwall Fiveways roundabout in Liverpool, the author of the tweet has shared this unexpected view.
Figure 1 screen shot 1
What does the Header mean
Figure 2 header
The author is Robin Ireland, his twitter user name is @robinHEG (all twitter usernames begin with @). All tweets written by Robin begin with his avatar. Some people use a real photograph of themselves as an avatar but many use another icon to represent themselves as has Robin in this example.
To find out more about the author just place the mouse over the avatar and a pop up with his profile description appears. (See Figure 3) From his profile description we can guess that his twitter name @robinHEG refers to his role as CEO of the Health Equalities Group. When Robin originally posted this tweet it was pushed to all his followers twitter feeds, all 1905 of them. I couldn’t see the tweet in my feed at this point as I am not a follower of Robin. Of those 1905 followers I happen to follow just two, LJMUFood and also Sport Dev @ LJMU.
This tweet was only “pushed” to my twitter feed because Sport Dev @LJMU decided to “retweet” this tweet so that it was pushed to everyone who follows them. I know this because above Robin’s name I can see the retweet icon in green and the name of a twitter user who I follow and the word Retweeted. (Figures 1 & 2)
Figure 3 mouse hovering over the avatar
The only other piece of information in the standard heading of a tweet is when this tweet was posted. On the first screen shot you can see 22h. This means that 22 hours before I looked at this and took a screen shot the tweet was posted. If you look at Figure 3, you can see that this has changed to 23h i.e. I took a screen shot showing the profile information an hour after I took the original screen shot. After 24 hours this time stamp changes to the date. In figure 4 the time has changed to Apr 17. If I want to know exactly when the tweet was posted, hovering the mouse over the date shows the time and the date of the posting.
Figure 4 mouse hovering over the date
Body of the Tweet
Childwall Fiveways roundabout #Liverpool. But not generally how you see it
The rest of the post consists of the text of the tweet and or an image, video or poll etc.
This post has two hashtags, these are #Liverpool and #lovelydaytocycle.
Think of these as metadata or tags but read the sentence as if the words were there without the hashtag.
Hashtags provide a means of searching twitter. For example if I wanted to see all the tweets about Liverpool that have been recently posted by anyone (not just by the people I follow) there is a search box on twitter.com that will return all those results whether you personally have a twitter account or not.
What to do now? For those of you without a twitter account go to the web page http://twitter.com and look at the example tweets on the home page, you could also search for any word you have an interest in either with or without the # in the search box. Look at the resulting tweets and look at their anatomy. Part 2 of this series is posted on the 18th May 2016.