With evolving modes of communication comes evolving means of citation. Tweet2Cite is a handy tool. Enter the URL for a tweet, and get the citation, in MLA or APA style.
Getting a URL for a tweet
This took a little effort to figure out. It’s not obvious.
In Twitter, under the tweet you would like to cite, click “Expand.”
Directly under the blue-fonted options, the time and date the tweet was sent will appear. To the right of that, click on “Details.”
This will open the tweet on its own webpage.
Copy the URL from the browser’s address bar. [Keyboard shortcut: CTRL+L will move your cursor to the address bar, highlighting the entire URL. CTRL+C to copy the selected text.]
Creating the citation
Paste the tweet’s URL in the box. [Keyboard shortcut: CTRL+V to paste.] Click “Go!”
Within seconds you will see the original tweet, and then the MLA and APA citations. Copy and paste to wherever you’d like to save the citation. [Keyboard shortcut: In Windows, place the cursor over a word. Double-clicking the mouse will select the word. Triple-clicking will select the paragraph. In this case, triple-click over a word in one of the citations to select the entire citation.]
Conclusion
This is indeed the citation format recommended by APAStyle.org and MLA.org. For APA style, the parenthetical citation would be (Twitter handle, year), in this case (Sue_Frantz, 2013). Remember, if you are citing multiple tweets from the same person in the same year, in your parenthetical citations letter the year as in (Sue_Frantz, 2013a), (Sue_Frantz, 2013b), etc.
Happy citing!
