Twitter Alerts: Critical information when you need it most

Today, we’re launching 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.

We know from our users how important it is to be able to receive reliable information during these times. 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.

Twitter Alerts is a new way to get accurate and important information when you need it most.

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 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.

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. If you’d like to become part of our Twitter Alerts partner program, check out this blog post with more details.

*To receive Twitter Alerts as push notifications, you must be using Twitter for iPhone version 5.10 or higher, and Twitter for Android 4.1.6 or higher.