Two Ways to Talk to Other Twitter Users

There are a couple of different ways to have conversations with other users on Twitter. You can direct message someone, which places a message in his account that only he can see, or you can reply to someone, which creates a message that can be seen publicly.

Placing the "@" symbol directly in front of another user's Twitter ID will send the tweet as a message to that person, while also making it viewable publicly. The message will then show up in the recipient's profile page showing updates that reference his name. These messages will also show up in the Twitter accounts for users that follow both users. When creating a message in this way, the label above the textbox on Twitter changes to "Reply to."

Public replies such as described above differ from direct messages. To send a direct message from your Twitter message window, type a lower case d followed by a space and the user's name. These messages will show up in the recipient's Direct Messages page, but not in anyone else's Twitter account. You will know that your syntax for sending a direct message is correct because the "What are you doing?" label will shift to say "Direct message" followed by the user name of the user to whom the message will be sent.

Should you use these techniques to communicate with other Twitter users? Definitely! Having conversations with others increases the opportunity to do some personal networking and it is a great branding / lead generation strategy. Other users like to feel appreciated, like everyone, so making reference to them is a little stroke of the ego that encourages more references to your own account.

The good thing is that Twitter messaging can be fun. Twitter is fast and dynamic. If you are communicating with serious Twitter uses, you should get a quick response. Just like everything else in life, with Twitter, the more you give, the more you get.