Can you tell if someone muted you on Twitter? Do they still see your tweets or anything you post? How is muting different to blocking on Twitter? Today’s post will seek to answer both of those questions and offer some useful advice for circumventing or overcoming being muted or blocked.
Love it or hate it, Twitter is here to stay. Whether you see it as a platform for fake outrage, trolling or genuine goodness depends on your experience with it so far. Mine has been positive but I know lots of people who have deleted the app through a negative experience.
Deleting is so final and is only one of the ways to handle people that use the network.
Has someone muted you on Twitter?
Muting someone on Twitter is a useful way of removing their stuff from your timeline without blocking them. It is a useful middle ground that enhances your Twitter experience without bringing up any awkward social situations in which you have to explain to someone why you blocked them.
Muting removes their Tweets from your timeline but does not tell the other person what has happened. So the answer to the main question of ‘Can you tell if someone muted you on Twitter? ’ the answer is no. And that is on purpose.
Muting is not unfollowing and it is not blocking. You can still DM a muted account and they can DM you. You just don’t see their Tweets in your timeline.
We all know someone who Tweets everything they do and a ton of pointless stuff that nobody in their right mind would be interested in. These over sharers are everywhere and while they mean well, they do make using Twitter harder work than it needs to be.
When we were discussing this topic in the office, someone told me you can actually tell if someone muted you on Twitter but only if you use Tweetdeck. I don’t use it now but I watched it tested.
- Open Tweetdeck and create a Home column in the main view.
- Add the person you suspect has muted you into this view.
- Post a Tweet to all your followers and then watch to see if it appears in the Home column.
If you see your Tweet appear in that column, you have not been muted. If your Tweet does not appear in the column, it is likely that you have been muted.
How to mute someone in Twitter
Muting someone is simple, you just need to open a Tweet and select the Mute setting. You can unmute just as quickly too.
To mute from a tweet:
- Open the Tweet and select the down arrow icon.
- Select Mute.
To mute from a user profile:
- Open the profile page of the person you want to mute.
- Select the three dot menu icon on the page.
- Select Mute from the menu.
To unmute someone you just need to visit their profile again and select the speaker icon to unmute them. The app sometimes differs and offers an option that says ‘You have muted Tweets from this account. ’ Select Unmute if you see that.
The many uses of muting
Muting someone on Twitter isn’t just about quieting the over sharers. Sure that is its primary objective but it is also useful if you manage social media accounts for work or as a profession. I used to do both of those and would use mute a lot.
Muting individuals
Muting individual Twitter users is handy both personally and professionally. Personally, you get to avoid their Tweets while remaining connected. This avoids some of that awkwardness that comes with blocking or unfriending. Professionally, it means you can clean up a commercial Twitter feed, filter out the marketing, spam and trolls and keep your timeline free and clear.
It also means you can maintain and grow your follower count without having to put up with their Tweets. While follower count is still seen as a metric for popularity, businesses and organizations have to keep it as high as possible. Muting keeps the numbers but cleans out the feed.
Muting organizations
I don’t know about you but during election time, the amount of spam and political messages I see on Twitter magnifies exponentially. It’s a good time to start muting spam accounts or those organizations who think you want to hear their message. If you’re finding a lot of spam in your feed, muting the firm that sent it really works.
While you cannot tell if someone muted you on Twitter without using Tweetdeck, it doesn’t really matter in the long run. Just take it as a reason for you to spend time on those that really matter. Everything else is just noise.
