I am not much of a twitterer. I do use it very occasionally bit but only to see what people are saying about some current topic or other. I have only ever tweeted myself a handful of times and only in response to another tweet.
TL/DR I don’t really know how to tweet effectively.
What I would like to know is, if I were to tweet someone, would that tweet be visible to followers of that person? I wish to highlight the illegal and antisocial activities of a local business that uses social media extensively. I would like to think that a little negative publicity might just shame them into changing their ways, but it certainly won’t if nobody else sees it.
Generally no. Tweeting to somebody will notify them, and if it’s something they find cool or complimentary they’d likely “re-tweet” it to their followers, but that obviously doesn’t fit here.
Sometimes twitterfolk also search somebody’s @twittername like a hashtag, to see who else is talking about them. Your message could show up in that kind of a search.
The other approach I can think of is to make up a hashtag ( #IllegalAntisocial ?) and try to get others to use it enough that it “trends”…
One thing that people like to do is reply to the company’s tweets with their complaints, which puts your tweet as part of a thread and people can see the thread if they are reading the tweet as its own page (as opposed to just as a single entity among many on their feed). That might get you more eyeballs.
I’m more of a Facebook user and people also do this on Facebook and it seems to be the main way I ever see complaints against a company. I might catch some complaints if I go to their Facebook page and then look at “posts from visitors” specifically, but if, say a company posts a new shirt I like and I see it has comments I will read the comments and see everyone’s complaints about service amongst the comments about the shirt.