We’ve all received them – automated DMs (direct messages) on Twitter for all sorts of things – to say hi, to sell a product, to get you to join their mafia family, whatever. They’re all spam. I tend to use DMs to send personal messages to people – to say hi, or send a thank you – things that are nicer to send personally than publicly. Recently I’ve received quite a few messages from people telling me that they don’t check their DMs, so they missed my messages. Are all these automated messages/spam ruining the ability to personally connect with people?
I admit that I get a lot of spam in my DMs as well, but it’s not that hard to filter through them using an application like TweetDeck or Tweetie. Even Twitter’s website makes it relatively easy to scan through a list of tweets to see if there’s anything of value. I actually have any DMs emailed to me as well. Why? Because I don’t want to miss any important messages.
Maybe DMs are going the way of email – where we don’t read much of it because there’s a low ratio of content-to-spam. But we all do get good email messages – ones that are very important – is the same true of DMs? Or is the content-to-spam ratio much lower?
What do you think? Do you use DMs to send personal messages to people? Do you monitor DMs? How do you monitor them?
(photo by Wrote @ Flickr CC)
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