Is direct messaging a good way of interaction at Twitter?

Direct Messaging is a mode of direct interaction with your followers. In case you wish to convey something personal to one of your followers you can do that by sending a direct message to them.

After Twitter exploded at the beginning of this year, the purpose of using Twitter changed multiple times. Initially, this micro blogging application was being used by people to interact with their friends as if it was a chatting application. People would tweet saying, “I am hungry right now” or, “I am studying right now”, just because the question at the tweet box asked, “what are you doing”?

Then suddenly somebody realized the fact that this tiny, yet powerful application can be used in business as well and then Twitter exploded. But came along with this was malpractices and spamming.

Today I get thousands of messages and tweets from Twitter, but there are hardly any useful ones. I have to browse through these thousand tweets to check if there is any useful message in it. Then there are those unnecessary and useless direct messages that I receive, which is an auto-direct-message set by somebody whom I chose to follow or, by yet others who decided that they would spam me to death.

So, are these direct messages that you receive on a daily basis relevant? Most of you would answer in the negative, but there is a different perspective to it.

Direct messages can be useful as well. Not all DMs are useless. You need to check through your direct messages, in order to see if there are any useful messages. How is it that DMs help me? Let us see a few examples -

1. Direct Messages are oriented towards selling something or, promoting something. Somebody so focused on marketing something might surely have done some research. So these DMs become a good source of niche ideas, keyword ideas and selling techniques ideas, which I use in my marketing plans after a bit more of research.
2. DMs tell me what is in vogue. It tells me what is hot and what is not. I use this information in my business.
3. Direct Messages give me a fair idea of which of the twitterers’ tweets can I look forward to and is helpful in forming a preliminary opinion about the twitterer.

You could find many more such thousand uses for these Direct messages. As correctly said by a wise-man, “Its all in the mind”.

The biggest drawback that I find in Twitter is the inability to send group Direct Messages. Probably Twitter wanted to keep a check on spamming and wanted to protect the privacy of its users.

There were a lot of such instances where I had to send direct messages to multiple users, but I couldn’t because of this limitation. I had been searching around for some way to do this. Unfortunately even with the Twitter API there were not too many applications that were developed to get this thing done.

That is when I stumbled upon this script. It is a simple script but can be used only with Firefox and Greasemonkey enabled. Greasemonkey is an add-on is Firefox. All you need to do is just run the script and then restart Firefox. Go to the Twitter direct messaging page and you will find an option to add multiple users to send Direct Messages to.

Check it out yourselves and comment upon what you think about it. You can find the group direct messaging script here.