When is a Twitter reply is not a reply?

Essentially a reply is not a reply when it's a quote, or what was called a quote, but is now called a retweet with a comment.

It's useful to fully understand the difference because they do different things and have vastly different audiences, so whether you choose one over the other should depend on what you are wanting to do, rather than habit.

Twitter Replies

This is screenshot of a tweet, viewed on desktop. The four icons directly below the tweet are: Reply, ReTweet, Like and Direct Message. Clicking the left icon "Reply" performs the same action as clicking in the reply box; which opens up for you to type your reply into.

Replies are special Tweets which are shown under the tweet you are replying to.

Crucially replies DO NOT, with a few exceptions, show on the default view of your profile.



This is one of the things it is really helpful to understand when replying.

That your twitter audience will largely not see your reply, but that your reply is more likely to be seen by people viewing the tweet you are replying to.

If the tweet you are replying to is from a high profile Twitter user then that could be a lot of people: but they are mostly people outside of any audience you have on Twitter.

Your reply is visible on your profile on the Tweets & Replies tab, which visitors of your profile can navigate to, but that is not the default view.

Your "replies" will not be seen in the home stream of your Twitter followers, with the exception being if they follow you AND they follow the person you are relying to.

Twitter is also now trying to "help" users see more by algorithmically highlighting some "interesting" content to users via notifications for content that would otherwise fall outside of their field of view.

Notifications

The user you replied to will receive a notification of your reply via Twitter, unless they have muted your account.

Twitter Quotes

The second icon is the "ReTweet" icon, which used to directly retweet the original tweet to your followers.

But for a while now you have been offered the chance to add some text and "quote" the tweet.

When you quote a tweet the user, who wrote the tweet you are quoting, will get a notification in a similar way to a reply.

Your interaction, your quote, is NOT visible to people who visit the original tweet. So your interaction and remarks are invisible to the audience who view the original tweet.

Your quote is basically a tweet of yours with a tweet of theirs attached; so as your tweet it DOES go out to the home stream of your followers. A vastly different action from a reply.

Whether a Tweet is a reply or a quote, viewers including the person who made the tweet have the option to reply retweet or quote. This rather limited set of options can lead to some pretty deep rabbit holes.

The trick in using twitter is to understand your options and how each option can have very different audiences. Hopefully this helps equip people with a level of understanding to make a choice which fits their use case each time. 

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