Direct Messages in Twitter are like private tweets that are visible only to the sender and the recipients. When you send a Twitter DM to another user, the tweet shows up in his Twitter Inbox while a copy of that message gets saved into your Sent Items just like regular email.
Twitter lets you send direct messages to any other Twitter user provided he or she is following you. The other big limitation is that you can only send one DM at a time.
There are situation when you want to send private DMs to multiple people on Twitter. For instance, it’s your birthday and a couple of people have sent you birthday greetings through public tweets. Now you can either thank them all with public tweets (@replies) or you can send them private DMs containing the same note.
Neither Twitter’s web interface nor their desktop and mobile clients support multiple DMs but you can use an online app called TweetGuru to message multiple Twitter users with one go.
It’s simple. Just authenticate the app with your Twitter account and type the Twitter handles of all the users whom you want to message (see screenshot). You can use TweetGuru to send direct messages to 12 different users at a time.
Related: Use one email address with all your Twitter accounts
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Reader Comments
Amit, is there any way to find out how many people actually lookinto their twitter DM inbox ? as far as I am concerned I do not look into my DM inbox. I know of many friends even they do not look into their DM inbox. Some how i feel sending DMs on twitter is not a very fruitful activity. What are your thoughts on this ?
Written by Meetu Singhal on 02.16.10
Interesting twitter app.. :) Will come in handy at many situations.
Written by Arun Shivaram on 02.16.10
Great tool for spammers.
Written by LouCypher on 02.16.10
@Meetu – Twitter DMs are like email so they stay forever in your Inbox / Sent Items folder. Also, users can set to receive instant email notifications / SMS alerts when they get a DM over Twitter .. I know a lot of people have this setting by default so they’re probably reading their DMs.
@Lou – You can send direct messages to people who follow you on Twitter. Why would anyone want to follow a “spammer” on twitter?
Written by Amit on 02.16.10
yeah i occasasionally receive message offering a kind of affiliate link that’s terrible
Written by seth godan on 02.17.10
I sort of agree to what Meetu has to say however…guess things are changing and people will slowly adopt it…dont see many issues as long as people stay at it
Written by Vivek on 02.17.10