Using Direct Messages Effectively

I generally dont bother reading any DM’s that people send me on twitter. Mostly because they are all trying to sell me something straight off the bat. Its quite funny really, that i am trying to get them to follow me so they will read my posts, buy my products etc. And yet they are doing exactly the same thing. Almost seems like no one is listening, but everyones talking.

But… Where was i. Ahh yes. So as i was saying i never really read the direct messages that people send me, that was until today. I was sifting through the junk when i noticed quite an interesting few. Most were trying to sell me products, or simply thanking me for following them. But others were almost “Starting” the conversation, and sneakily trying to get me to give them a plug on my twitter.

For example I was following a profile about NBA basketball players. They had sent me an automatic message saying “Thanks For Following! Send a tweet @(username) and tell us your favourite NBA player”. At first this seems like the normal crap you find on twitter. But at second look it simply amazes me.

Basically it goes like this. You add them, they use something like Tweet Later to auto follow you back and send you a DM at the same time. In that DM they ask you to say something @ them in a tweet. If you oblige you basically give them a plug on your twitter profile. Anyone following you will see their username in your tweet and may well check out their profile. If you could get a “plug” on someones profile with say 10k+ followers you could definitely see a tidal wave of followers (Or atleast a few extra clicks on your links!).  Essentially its “backlinks” to your profile on auto pilot.

Check out Tweet Later to setup an auto follow back and/or an auto DM feature so you can try this out for yourself. It wont really work for outright spam profiles, but im definitely seeing some benefits from it already on some of my tight niche users.

Just as a side note, Remember the huge #fixreplies issue so peoples tweets wont always show up in their timeline. But if their anything like me, they go read peoples profiles manually, not through the global timeline.

O yes, and i guess ill sort out some sort of DM’ing in the new version of twitter adder