Social Media Marketing Workbook: Understanding the @ Sign or Handle on Twitter

Jason McDonald, in his book, "Social Media Marketing Workbook 2016"  includes a section where he focuses on Twitter and how it is utilized as a professional platform. He goes over the ins and outs of the platforms including the importance of understanding the @ sign or "Handle."

McDonald emphasizes that the @ sign specifies a Twitter account. The @ sign, often referred to as users "handle" does two things when incorporated into a tweet:

    - It becomes clickable. Any user who views the tweet can click on the @handle and see the account that is associated with the handle. 

    - It is present in the news feed and sends an alert to the user that has been mentioned using the @handle. This is called a mention and essentially means that someone has tagged you (your twitter account) in a tweet.

Along with mentions, McDonald makes a point to emphasize the importance of a retweet. Like a mention, a retweet allows a tweet to be linked to a user's account. McDonald would use the example; if Ellen DeGeneres recapped your joke on her TV show. That "retweet" of your joke would urge her followers to explore your profile, increasing your followers.

McDonald says that as Twitter users and professionals, we do not have to be famous to converse with influential people in our line of work. He recommends that professional and personal users of Twitter take advantage of the @ sign or handles to engage with these important people. Just like in the Ellen DeGeneres example, if someone important retweets your tweet, you are more likely to see the benefits of that mention.

To help you gain a better understanding of handles and the @ sign, I have embedded a YouTube video of Jason McDonald talking on the subject. Please take a moment to check it out!

Twitter Fiction

Andrew Fitzgerald is a contributor to the News and Journalism Partnership team at Twitter. His role in the team is to analyze Twitter's role as a digital storytelling modem as well as other social media platforms. He is an avid writer, editor, and tweeter.

In July of 2013, Andrew Fitzgerald gave a talk at Ted about how social media is becoming an ever-expanding realm of possibility. Andrew as well mentioned how we as social media users can discover and invent so many different means of storytelling through various social media platforms. He focused on Twitter and expressed how he sees the platform's potential as a fictional storytelling medium.

I have never noticed storytelling present on Twitter; however, this might be the issue that Andrew Fitzgerald was trying to uncover by giving this Ted talk.

The world of social media is a great channel for expressing stories if they can get any notice. Viewing a story unfolding live over Twitter would be something I would take an interest in. It would be as if you are watching the writer go through the writing process in real time.

This form of live storytelling could even allow the average everyday user to comment and add onto a digital-fiction story. Resulting in an expansive story that has been orchestrated by one writer, but expanded upon by many.

 If we can use the platforms for self-expression and storytelling, the structure of social media could change completely. Fitzgerald said in his Ted talk,

" I actually believe that we are in a wide-open frontier for creative experimentation, if you will, that we've explored and begun to settle this wild land of the Internet and are now just getting ready to start to build structures on it. Those structures are the new formats of storytelling that the Internet will allow us to create."

Take a look at Andrew Fitzgerald's Ted talk and get a sense of what he is trying to uncover with digital storytelling.