Twitter - Reply vs Quote

I wrote, back in 2018, about how a Twitter reply is not a reply when it's a quote. Today many Twitter users habitually "respond" by quoting rather than using reply.

There are times where you should avoid that tweet-quote habit, I'll come to that shortly. But first a basic overview of reply vs quote. 

A tweet ...

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform. Users publish updates (tweets) which may be seen by their followers.

Tweets are generally public, so while they might be seen by the tweet authors followers, each tweet can be viewed by anyone on or off Twitter.

A reply ...

When a user replies, the reply tweet is shown below the original tweet. The tweet author is notified about your reply.

Your reply should not generally be seen by your followers. The reply will be seen by anyone who opens the tweet you replied to: that's most likely to be the followers of the original tweet author.

A quote ...

When you choose to respond with a "quote" instead of a reply the tweet author is still notified, but their tweet is embedded below the text of your tweet. This new tweet from you will appear to YOUR followers and is not visible from the original tweet page. 

The takeaway ...

• A reply is not presented to your followers.
• A quote tweet is presented to your followers. 

Avoid using quote here ...

There is one place where quoting a tweet will NOT be seen by your Twitter followers. That's when the quote tweet is in a Twitter Community.

While there may be good reasons to quote a tweet into a community, or out of a community for that matter, you should avoid quoting a community tweet into the same community.

The above example shows two tweets in Twitter's Feedback Community. One, "Do you ever feel ..." is asking community members a question. Then a response quote: "Everyday". 

What's wrong with that? Well ... the quote tweet by BossTips isn't for his followers, it's for the same audience as the previous tweet. It's a reply, but technically it isn't. So instead it's noise, it's clutter. 

When people do this often the community gets messy. You might not care, but the community owner and moderators who's community you are quoting into, they might care. 

There will obviously be exceptions to this rule; but unless you are adding real value, avoid quoting tweets into the same community.

Follow @qwallis