On Wednesday, Twitter launched Twitter Alerts, a new feature that brings us one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information from credible organizations during emergencies, natural disasters or moments when other communications services aren’t accessible.
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.
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 attwitter.com/FEMA/alerts for an example.
Currently, a number of organizations in the U.S., Japan and Korea can send Alerts, and we will expand the service to include more public institutions and NGOs around the world.
