If you are uniniated to the lingo, an auto DM is a direct message that you get when you start following someone. Now that I am following 200+ people, I can say that I have a sense of what these are now, as I have received many a DM post-follow. And naturally, I wonder if I should have a DM set up for myself? If so, what should it be like?
Let’s first look at some characteristics or categories of DMs that may exist, based on the ones I’ve received.
- The “free” offer – I sometimes get the “hey check out my free e-book” or some other offering. On occasion, I might like to do this, although I haven’t yet for those who have sent me some interesting item. In other instances, there is a button named delete.
- “thanks” for following – that pretty much says it all. IMHO, I don’t think these are necessary, although it is nice to see such thankfulness ins social networking.
- More Twitter – Since we connected on Twitter, if you have something Twitter-like you can share with me in your DM, that might be useful. I’ve received a few messages with other Twitter references or followers on Twitter, I like that.
Here are my thoughts on why an auto DM, although seemingly destested, might be worthwhile, if done right:
- In this DM, you share something that you haven’t already shared in recent tweets or in your basic profile space. Perhaps it is a tip, a link to check out your friendfeed, Linkedin profile, a slideshare deck, anything else new and exciting.
- You actually do want to build your Keith Ferrazzi quotient for the day and offer yourself as a resource to people. You want to help other people succeed. Provide some information about how you might do that.
- Could it be a forum for asking a question, which you hope will engage the user and write a @craftydlib replyback to you? Of course, if this is the course of action, you might want to change up the question in your DM fairly frequently, in-line with your number of new followers.
Thus far, I think I received a few post-follow message that was personalized, or so I think, as it contained my name. Since my first name is not in my Twitter handle, I assumed this was a personal message, but there is probably a tool that would extract my name from my profile for input in the auto DM message. Of course, I just found TwitterDMER that will perform this function.
No worries, I haven’t set up my own DM yet, so you can follow me without fear. I’m not sure that I will. I haven’t received too many that are overwhelmingly useful yet, well for my purposes anyway. But if you need me, you know were to look.
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