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I have a twitter feed that sends out new YouTube music videos for a specific genre. I want my followers to easily find the artist’s Twitter page. I'm currently sending something similar to:

some text
@artisttwitter - name of the song
[youtube link]

Is using @ the proper way of doing this? Sometimes I feel like I'm spamming the artist since this will send them a notification.

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2 Answers 2

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Using an @ mention is absolutely the proper way of doing this.

It has three benefits:

  • For the reader, it's the easiest way for them to find the artist, and follow them on Twitter
  • For the artist, many of them will be evaluating their popularity (and in your case, the popularity of a new video) by the number of people that mention them on Twitter.
  • The username of the artist is specific and exact; a hashtag for an artist could take many different forms (ie. #ironmaidenvideo, #maiden, #ironmaiden, #maidenmetal, #maidenlive).

Linking readers to a hashtag doesn't really help them find the artist. Likewise, for the artist, it becomes more complicated to get good feedback, unless they've specifically created their own hashtag for this purpose.

Twitter supports the use of mentions the way I've described them here, and distinguishes them from replies: https://support.twitter.com/articles/14023-what-are-replies-and-mentions

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  • Thanks for that info. I'll have to read more about @mentions
    – the_lotus
    Sep 17, 2014 at 18:09
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Use a hashtag instead. @ means you're directing the message to whatever follows the @, while # means what you're posting is about whatever follows it.

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  • But it won't let readers easily find the artist, so fails to address the problem.
    – MaryC.fromNZ
    Sep 18, 2014 at 9:36
  • @MaryC.fromNZ semantically, @ is used to direct a tweet "at" the person following it, which is not what the OP wanted to do. If you want to direct someone to a twitter page, it might be best to just paste the URL to it in your tweet, in shortened form.
    – Aaron Lewis
    Sep 19, 2014 at 15:22
  • O)k - so why don't you post that as an alternative answer, which does address the original question.
    – MaryC.fromNZ
    Sep 25, 2014 at 10:53

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