Before addressing this issue in depth, we first want to clarify what the Mentions column is. HootSuite's Mentions column is designed to display everything you would see if you viewed your @Mentions within your Twitter account. If you log into Twitter, click "Home", then click @Mentions, you should see exactly what you would see in HootSuite's Mentions column -- there should be no variance.

With that said, you may notice that when you do a search for your username in Twitter, you see mentions that do not appear either in HootSuite's Mentions column or in Twitter.com's @Mentions view. In fact, Twitter does not regard these messages as Mentions; they regard them as Native Retweets.

As opposed to manually adding an "RT @username" in front of a message, a Twitter Web Retweet is created by clicking the Retweet button on Twitter.com. HootSuite also has this option for retweets, although it is not our default. When you use Twitter.com or HootSuite, recognizing a Twitter Web Retweet is easy -- they are accompanied by a Retweet symbol.

Unfortunately, Twitter Search displays Twitter Web Retweets without the retweet symbol. Instead, they're displayed the same way as a manual retweet ("RT @username"). How they display on Twitter Search, and how they display on HootSuite as well as Twitter.com are very different.

We do acknowledge that the difference between a "manual" retweet and a Twitter Web Retweet is confusing. However, our aim is to be as faithful as possible to Twitter's API, and to display information exactly as our userbase would view this information on Twitter.com.