The reigning monarch of the U.K., Queen Elizabeth, joined the social media world of Twitter Friday by sending out her first 140-character message. While visiting London's Science Museum, the Queen tweeted a message via a British Monarchy account promoting the new exhibition.

"It is a pleasure to open the Information Age exhibition today at the @ScienceMuseum and I hope people will enjoy visiting," she said, signing the message, "Elizabeth R."

The message was reportedly pre-written, meaning Her Majesty only had to press the "Tweet" button to publish the inaugural short post.

The British Monarchy account has been active since 2009, but is typically only used to release official "updates, pictures and videos from Buckingham Palace" about the royal family's public duties. In 2013, the palace took to Twitter to announce the birth of Prince William and Kate Middleton's son, George. The royal aides who run the social media account have sent out over 19,000 messages, but this is the first time that the Queen herself has ever been involved in messaging.

Within 45 minutes the message had been retweeted over 4,000 times. And only eight hours after Queen Elizabeth sent the tweet, it had accumulated more than 24,000 retweets and 23,000 likes. The British Monarchy account had swelled in followers to over 788,000, up 64,000 more from the day before.
It is unclear whether the 88-year-old ruler will begin tweeting regularly, but a palace source told People magazine to "watch this space" for more news.

Interestingly, the Monarchy has its own official Twitter account and the feed @ClarenceHouse follows the news of Prince Charles, Prince William and Kate and Prince Harry. Prince Andrew is the only senior royal family member to tweet personally, under the account @DukeofYork. Andrew's daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, each have their own private Twitter pages.