Last night, “Twitter Alerts” was formally launched by the microblogging giant, promising features that bring Twitter one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information from credible organizations during emergencies.
“We know from our users how important it is to be able to receive reliable information during these times,” Twitter said on its official blog. ”
With that in mind, last year we announced Lifeline (a feature that helps Japanese users find emergency accounts during crises), and since then, we’ve been working on a related feature for people around the world,” the post continues.
Here’s how it works.
If you sign up to receive an account’s Twitter Alerts, you will receive a notification directly to your phone whenever that account marks a Tweet as an alert.
Notifications are delivered via SMS, and if you use Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android, you’ll also receive a push notification.
“Alerts also appear differently on your home timeline from regular Tweets; they will be indicated with an orange bell.” Twitter says.
To subscribe to these notifications, you can go directly to an account’s setup page, which you’ll find at twitter.com/[username]/alerts. See FEMA’s page at twitter.com/FEMA/alerts for an example. Additionally, on web, you can see if an organization is part of the program when you visit its profile.
To learn more about Twitter Alerts, click here.