We’ve been bumping up against an issue with Twitter mentions recently so we reached out to the folks at HootSuite for an explanation. Maybe you’re having the same issue. Here it is in a nutshell:
Many of our followers mention and retweet our content. We’re thankful and we’d like to respond. Although it’s impossible when those mentions/retweets don’t show up in our mentions column within Twitter or HootSuite. Here’s HootSuite’s response:
“We appreciate your patience. Before addressing this issue in depth, we first want to clarify what the Mentions column is. HootSuite’s Mentions column is designed to display everything you would see if you viewed your @Mentions within your Twitter account. If you log into Twitter, click “Home”, then click @Mentions, you should see exactly what you would see in HootSuite’s Mentions column — there should be no variance.
With that said, you may notice that when you do a search for your username in Twitter, you see mentions that do not appear either in HootSuite’s Mentions column or in Twitter.com’s Mentions view. In fact, Twitter does not regard these messages as Mentions; they regard them as Native Retweets.
As opposed to manually adding an “RT @username” in front of a message, a Twitter Web Retweet is created by clicking the Retweet button on Twitter.com. HootSuite also has this option for retweets, although it is not our default. When you use Twitter.com or HootSuite, recognizing a Twitter Web Retweet is easy — they are accompanied by a Retweet symbol.
Unfortunately, Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com) displays Twitter Web Retweets without the retweet symbol. Instead, they’re displayed the same way as a manual retweet (“RT @username”). How they display on Twitter Search, and how they display on HootSuite as well as Twitter.com are very different. This is why the retweet by @SeanMcGinnis showed up in your #usguys column, and not your Mentions column.
The reason this message did not show up in “Your Tweets, Retweeted” was because, strictly speaking, this was not your retweet. Rather, this was @SeanMcGinnis retweeting himself using the Twitter Web Retweet method. If he manually retweeted that message, it would have shown up in your Mentions.
We do acknowledge that the difference between a “manual” retweet and a Twitter Web Retweet is confusing. However, our aim is to be as faithful as possible to Twitter’s API, and to display information exactly as our userbase would view this information on Twitter.com. If you have additional questions about the variance between your search columns and your Mentions columns, please let us know.”
Thanks, HootSuite, for the explanation.
