Today, we continue with examining the anatomy of the Twitter home page. Yesterday, we focused on the tweet stream, and how to post a tweet. 

Now, we’ll look at the other tabs in the left column. 

We’ve already talked about the timeline, so we’ll look at the next tab over "@Mentions." As we’ve talked about in the past, @mentions are when someone uses @your_twitter_name to either send you a public message, or mention you in their tweets.

When we click on the tab, we get this: 

Here, you can easily see the two types of @mentions – the first one, from Bridget Pilloud (@intutivebridge) is a reply to a message I’d sent her.  It begins with my Twitter name and is publicly visible.

The second type is a mention, as in the tweet from LXBN – they are tweeting about my Twitter post from yesterday, and including my Twitter handle as the author.  This is also a publicly tweeted message, but since my name appears later in the tweet, it is visible to all of their followers, not just our shared followers.

And here, you can also see a third type of mention – that’s the retweet.  Jill Rako retweeted my message to her yesterday about gratitude, in the old style of retweeting. So it includes my Twitter name in the main body of the message, and Jill added her own comments. This puts it in the @mentions list as well.

From this column, we have a few options. As you can see from the bottom tweet which is highlighted in pink, when you mouseover, you have the options of favoriting the tweet, retweeting or replying.  This will work the same way as when we did it yesterday.

But you’ll also notice that there’s a little speech bubble and an arrow on the right hand side.  What’s that for? Well, when we click the arrow, a window pops up on the right that shows us the conversation that we’ve had with that Twitter user!

Here, you can see that I clicked the arrow next to my tweet from Intuitive Bridge, and the conversation that we’ve had came up. This can be helpful if it’s been a day or so since the last tweet, and you’re trying to figure out the thread of the conversation. 

Now, let’s move over to the next tab, Retweets.

Before we click on the tab, notice that there is a down arrow next to the word "Retweets." When we click the arrow, we get a menu: 

We have the option of looking at Retweets by others, Retweets by us, or our tweets, retweeted.  We’ll go through each of these options, starting with retweets by others. 

 When we click on that, we get this: 

As you can see, this filters our full tweet stream into just retweets – you’ll notice that it only includes the new style of retweet, and not the original.  This can be a helpful list, because it gives you the chance to see what types of things the people you follow are finding interesting – it may help you find new people to follow or expose you to articles that are getting lost in the noise of the full tweet stream. 

The next option is Retweets  by you. When we click on this, we get: 

This is the list of tweets that I have retweeted, using the new style of retweet. In case I wanted to see what I’ve retweeted in the past, since I’m often retweeting things of interest to me, that I might want to look at again later. 

And finally, we can see others’ retweets of posts that we’ve tweeted.

At first glance, it looks just like a list of our tweets that have been retweeted. While it’s helpful to know what people find of interest, it’s also useful to see WHO those people are! Especially so we can thank them for sharing our content.  

Never fear, we can get to that information!

With each tweet, there is an arrow when you mouseover it – those that also include a document icon indicate that there is an attachment.  When we click on the arrow, we get the tweet, as well as those who retweeted it: 

This is very useful! From here, I can see that this tweet was retweeted by four people. I could click on each of those photos and/or twitter names to thank them for sharing my tweet. 

Let’s move on to the next tab – "Searches." The searches tab also has a down arrow that offers us some options: 

In my case, it’s showing me a saved search.  So this will be different for everyone.  This is helpful if you want to keep track of the tweets from a certain hashtag, without having to find and click it each time.

So let’s look at how to do that. 

First, we’ll go back to our timeline to look at our full Twitter list again (in this case, I’m actually going to look at my retweets, since I know there’s a hashtag that I want to follow in there).  

You can see in this tweet that I retweeted from Amy Knapp, she uses the #LMAMKT hashtag.  To look at other tweets with that hashtag, I’ll click on it. 

I get this page: 

Twitter considers this to be a search, for all tweets including #LMAMKT, which I can see here.  If I want to be able to go back to this easily, I can click the "Save this search" button at the top, which will include it in my "Searches" list. 

As Michael Caine would say "Easy peasy lemon squeezy." 

If I decided at some point that I no longer wanted to save this search, I could delete it here using the same button.  

Let’s look at what else we can do here.  You can also see that next to the word "Tweets" is a dropdown menu that allows us to filter the tweets we have.  We’re currently defaulting to the "Top" tweets, but we can also look at all tweets, or just those with links. 

I’m not sure how Twitter defines tweets as "top," but my assumption is they are those that are favorited or retweeted. (Any Twitter experts want to weigh in on this?).

All tweets is self-explanatory:

And we can also look at just those tweets with links: 

Further, from this page, we can also refine our search results if we wanted to. We click on the link on the righthand side, which brings us to an advanced search page: 

Since we’re searching within the LMAMKT hashtag, that is already populated for us.  You can see that we have the option of including keywords, either a list of words, an exact phrase, any of a list of words, or excluding words. We can search by language, from certain twitter users or to certain twitter users, or even mentioning certain twitter users. We can look by location, and even select whether we’re looking for positive or negative tweets, questions, or retweets. 

And whatever additional search terms you add, when the results come in, you can save that exact search if you so desire. This will then appear in your dropdown menu for searches on your home page, for you to access at any time: 

The last tab on the home page is "lists," but since they can be a post all on their own, we’ll leave that for now. We’ll come back tomorrow to talk about the right hand side of the Twitter home page.