Twitter – Deleting a status tweet accidentally published on Twitter

I think you are thinking about it differently.

These companies rely on your promotion. So when the host says every week

tweet your questions and comments to us.

They are asking for you to

1) Follow them / Place them a list - They want to know that you are looking at their timeline and that your followers see that you are following the company

2) Mention {@username} them / Reply. Here you are promoting communication to the Radio Show, depending on how their twitter client is set up, these "mentions" will be received by the user/company in a better format than

Science Friday Rocks

which then all tweets on Science Friday will need to be searched by hand. They could have used a #hashtag (e.g. #scifri instead ,thus clumping the event messages) to achieve the same objective.

On inspecting the site you have linked it seems directions are given as to what to do to ensure your message is received

Use Twitter? follow @scifri to get our updates, and tweet your questions and comments to us during the program.

I have hyperlinked the relevant portion of their message. So there are three ways I know that you could have found their account on twitter.

1) http://twitter.com/#!/@scifri 2) http://twitter.com/@scifri 3) http://twitter.com/scifri

Any would lead to their twitter account. Now I do not know much about scifri but it does not seem like they acknowledge receipt of your mentions via their account. Maybe during their podcast (Fridays, 2-4 pm Eastern time), the interesting comments/questions are selected for the rest of the audience to see.

In your next example with support requests, I think you should look at

http://twitter.com/support
and
http://twitter.com/delbius

who are representatives for Twitter Support Team, as said on the support account page

Make sure you are following us if you'd like a response to your DM

I would hope that the company you are working with executes this in a similar manner

• Ensure whatever needs to be sent in private will be done as a direct message
• If the information can benefit the customers at large then it shall be broadcasted in public

Companies also tend to use Twitter to try to persuade users into writing shorter questions (getting content into 140 characters) so that they can read and respond as quickly as it was sent.

If you delete a tweet it disappears for ever (although in some cases they may appear in Twitter search for a little while after)

Twitter and any clients using the streaming API will remove the tweet from a users stream almost immediately. Other clients using the REST API will remove the tweet once the timeline is refreshed.

I'm not 100% sure on what would happen mid-reply but I would have thought the reply will be sent successfully as the id of the now deleted tweet will have already been attached to the new tweet. I guess it would depend on how each client handled incoming and outgoing tweets. In any case the worst thing that would happen would be an error message being to displayed to the user.

Deleted tweets will disappear from a conversation chain.

I'm not sure if deleting tweets is frowned upon but if the information you have posted is incorrect or you no longer want to tweet it then it's entirely up to you as to whether you delete the tweet or not.