How to give the URL of a Tweet - updated for New Twitter

   This was originally posted in September 2011, but since then we have all been moved on to New Twitter and sompe of the apps wwe used to access Twitter with have changed to fit in with it.                                       

Usually, once you have sent a tweet on Twitter, you can forget all about it and move on to the next one. But what if you want to draw somebody's  attention to that particular tweet? The most obvious reason for needing to give a link to a tweet, if you are a comper, is to prove that you have entered a competition. Then you may need to send the promoter the URL, or address, of the specific tweet you entered with.

Sometimes when you enter a competition on a blog, you are asked to tweet about it for one of your entries. What better way to prove that you have tweeted than by giving a link to your tweet? And there is a new service that handles entries for blog competitions, called Rafflecopter,  which makes it so much clearer how to enter each competition than the old "list of tasks", but if you enter by tweeting, you need to be able to paste in a link to your tweet.

If you want to see Rafflecopter in action, have a look at the current competitions on Fuss Free Living   - and read on to see how to paste in a link to your Twitter entry!  

First send your tweet in the normal way, using whatever system you prefer. Then log on to your Twitter web page and select Profile or Your Tweets, so you can see a list of your own tweets, and identify which message you want to link to.

Look at the top message above - "Please ignore this message for now....." (If you were watching me on Twitter as I was writing this post you may have been wondering what it was all about.). Can you see where it says "12 minutes ago" underneath the message?

Update: to open the page as shown below now, you need to find the time it was posted, which is now at the top right of the tweet. When you hover your mouse over it, the time will change to "Open". Click on this and you will see a line of further information  about the tweet underneath it. Click on the word "Details" at the right of this line and your new window will open.

Well, that is the time it was sent, and if you  click on the time at the bottom of your message it will open a new page, something like this:

And there you are - your tweet, on a web page of its very own, which you can save as a bookmark or copy the address from the browser bar to give as a link to it. You can come back to your tweet days, months or even years later - the URL will not change.

If you are entering a Rafflecopter based competition and you are really, REALLY quick, once you have clicked "send" on your tweet you will see the message "View it on Twitter" appear in the box just before it closes. Clicking on this will take you straight to the tweet so you can copy the URL. But you have to be quick! The box disappears after only about a second.

If you would like to practise by posting a link to one of your tweets as a reply to this, feel free to give it  a try!