# Twitter question **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 30, 2016, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twitter-question/767291 "2016-09-30T16:49:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![ticker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/d07c76/32.png) [@ticker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ticker)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twitter-question/767291/1 "2016-09-30T16:49:49Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![chrisk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@chrisk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chrisk)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 5:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twitter-question/767291/2 "2016-09-30T17:55:17Z")
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”… ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2016, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/twitter-question/767291/3 "2016-09-30T20:02:02Z")
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.