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Ask HN: Non-spammy mass messaging on Twitter?

1 points by mcollinsblog ↗ HN
Well, it's about that time – time to get involved with Twitter. Yeah, I'm a little late to the party, but I think I've got some good ideas on how I can use Twitter to augment my business.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to send out mass semi-customized messages. I realize this is something Twitter probably doesn't want you to do, which is why you have to have followers to send out direct messages.

Now, I have heard you can use @reply to send messages to people who aren't following you. But then, don't all those @replies show up in your feed?

So if someone was to visit your profile, they'd see a bunch of @replies addressed to different people?

I want to do this in the most natural way possible. I figure there's gotta be a way to get in contact with a large amount of people, but thus far, I haven't found a method that shows real promise.

Is there any method you guys have found useful for contacting a lot of people through Twitter? Thanks!

4 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 17.1 ms ] thread
paulhauggis
Start getting active and following people that might be interested in your app or service. You can automate some stuff, but the key is to make it look like there is actually someone there.
harrywye
If you send @ messages to a large number of people, that's spam, by definition. They don't have to visit your profile to see that. Some of them will just "flag" you if you send them unsolicited @ messages, and you can, and will eventually, be banned from Twitter.

There is no other (legit) way, in my view. If you want to send messages to a large number of people, then you'll have to build your audience/followers over time.

PS: Here's an article I wrote a few weeks ago, if you are interested: http://blog.tweetdelegate.com/post/21164614504/how-do-you-ge...

harrywye
WARNING: It's very looooong. :) Read it from the failwhale image, if you wish.
episod
Twitter provides a great way to communicate one-to-many: the simple tweet. It broadcasts to your account's followers and potentially beyond. Some might miss your message or not get it when you want them to since you didn't use an invasive technique, but this is the core use case of Twitter, what it enables. You know users won't see all your tweets. Users know they won't see all your tweets. And then you act accordingly within that system. Better to adapt to this model then to try to adapt the model to what you want to accomplish -- bulk atomic messaging.