Twitter Update: Now Send Direct Messages to Anyone, Even If You Don’t Follow Each Other!

Twitter now enabled you to send Direct Messages to anyone around the world. Similarly, you can receive the messages too. This is a big change made by the leading social networking site. And this will bring an enormous change in how Twitter is being used, especially by brands!

Twitter made an announcement yesterday that, “we’re rolling out these changes starting today to all users around the world. And we have lots more in the works to improve Direct Messages on Twitter, so that the private side of Twitter is just as fulfilling as the public side.”

As of now, the update is been rolled out for Twitter App for Android and iOS users. There is no such official confirmation about the update for the desktop users. But Twitter is expecting to increase the user base after this update of direct messaging.

To activate this feature, just go to your Twitter account settings and you should find something like this at the end of the screen. Once you have the box checked, this feature will be activated for you.

I still remember the day when I started using Twitter for the first time. Although, I started using it in 2013, I use it pretty effectively now. But it was quite hard to connect with a person that doesn’t follow me. There were many situations when I faced such problems. In such cases, you have tag the person and send a normal tweet. The tweet will be seen by everyone in the world. Nothing will be private, if any. In most cases, when you are interacting for the first time with someone, you generally do not want to publicly say something (for obvious reasons)

Here is an example: Just few days back I had this conversation with Arun Prabhudesai, founder of Trak.in, when I was not following him. I wanted to work as a blogger for his tech blog, but I was unable to send him a direct message on Twitter because we weren’t following each other. So here’s what I did:

It was quite hard to hold my nerves because I was desperately waiting for his reply. If the same conversation was in the form of direct messages, it would have hardly taken few seconds to reply.

Brands Will Love to Reach Their Customers Directly

Now that it is possible to send direct messages to the users that you don’t follow, it would be really helpful for the online brands to send some exciting offers to the customers all around the world. The same is being done in the form of email marketing as there is no such way to connect with the customers to display their offers in today’s date.

But now, with direct messages in place, it will be easier to connect them on Twitter. In fact, many businesses all over the world provide Twitter support which now makes it easy to keep the discussion confidential with their clients.

Not just receiving the direct messages, but you can also reply to the same message irrespective of the person is following you or not.

However, a word of caution. Popular personalities should try to avoid keeping this on, otherwise they will have incessant flow of DMs. The good thing is that Twitter gives the power in your hands, you decide whether you want to activate it or not!