How To Send Direct Messages In Twitter To People Who Don’t Follow You? [Hacks And Mods]

Twitter does not allow users to send direct messages to people who do not follow you, though that may act as a deterrent to stop spamming, direct messages are much more better than sending a message via a reply.

Tech Spikes has a nice hack that will allow you to send a direct message to people who do not follow you in twitter.

To send a DM to a non-follower in Twitter, you have to derivetheir DM URL to create a DM message. Here’s the syntax

http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/twitterusername

Replace the twitterusername with the twitter id of the person to whom you wish to send the DM and you can send a direct message to a user without them following you.

Hack Tip From Tech Spikes

Update: This trick might no longer work

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  1. Twilight Fairy on September 23rd, 2008 at 1:32 pm #

    I would appreciate if you give credit to the “original” source rather than from where you saw this post. If you would see the post on techspike, you would see that Narayan saw this hack on my blog.

  2. Owen Blacker on September 26th, 2008 at 4:32 am #

    It doesn’t work; they’ve fixed their bug.

    “You cannot send messages to users who are not following you.”

    Thankfully.

    If I wanted someone to be able to DM me and to be able to see their tweets, I’d follow them. They can @-message me instead and I’ll see it on http://search.twitter.com/search?q=owenblacker

  3. SpRnch on May 24th, 2009 at 7:47 am #

    Thank gosh this is fixed

  4. jas on June 18th, 2009 at 7:14 pm #

    this is not hacking

  5. Christian on July 27th, 2009 at 11:40 am #

    With respect, I don’t know why you’d post this loophole on your site, because they only people who would find value in it are people who wanted to spam users on this site. Am I wrong?

    • Kristy Johnson on January 29th, 2010 at 12:24 am #

      you’re wrong..i just wanted to send a message to an old friend but whatever

  6. Nick Wood on September 26th, 2009 at 3:13 am #

    Tried this at 8.14am on the 26th sept 09 and no longer works !

  7. Eddie Kuns on November 29th, 2009 at 5:01 pm #

    @Christian, there are plenty of valid reasons to want to send a message to someone not following you that won't be SPAM. One person I follow (but who does not follow me) has their software resending the same tweet once a day at the same time each day, and to boot, the tweet references a blog URL that doesn't go to a blog but to the same tweet. A tweet with a URL referencing itself rather than the intended blog site.

    It would be nice to be able to direct message this person in case she doesn't know.

  8. Thomas on January 4th, 2010 at 11:06 pm #

    It is not working :(

  9. vandana on February 2nd, 2010 at 1:44 am #

    totally worked for me! I just sent a message across my two accounts, and it worked! thanks a lot.

  10. Faiz on February 11th, 2010 at 9:55 am #

    This method doesn't works. I think it is not at all possible to DM someone who don't follow you.

    • adamtaha on May 2nd, 2010 at 1:32 pm #

      @Christian, there is a reason I'd like to use such a method but it doesn't work.

      One of the reason is, I get people tweeting me for example..

      "Would you like 10,000 followers this week etc etc.."

      And this person has only two followers.

      Instead of embarrassing her and pay my ego, I rather direct message her to give her advise and why it is best to first set an example, and do so by saying it nicely.

      She maybe new to social media and marketing, and sometimes a little help is needed. Whether the person listens to the advise or not, is fine.

      Yes, agreed, some may try to use it to spam but there are some of us, who care enough, to give to people and also care enough about the industry, to try and educate so it does go nuts even more.

      Adam Taha

  11. THU on March 23rd, 2010 at 4:03 pm #

    Guess what punk; it didn't work. You damn spam didn't work. They've fixed the whole you know, spam business.

  12. barry on May 15th, 2010 at 10:50 pm #

    http://twitter.com/direct_messages/create/ does not work. comes up and says you can't dm someone who does not follow you.

  13. vena on May 23rd, 2010 at 9:03 pm #

    Sorry, it did not work anymore…any other path? thanks

  14. gracy on June 1st, 2010 at 6:20 am #
  15. sam on July 2nd, 2010 at 12:06 pm #

    hey i tried this trick and it doesnt work…it says ''u cant send DM if the person isnt following u''

  16. LLLLLKEvi on September 30th, 2010 at 9:14 am #

    It’s not working for this method ==

  17. Ateliers SEO on November 15th, 2010 at 4:26 am #

    Obviously, Twitter has changed its programming to stop that backdoor, hence rendering this article obsolete. I hope that Google has a strategy to protect the search results of obsolete information to appear to its first page. I see more and more expired result at 1st serp and it is becoming an annoyance for all of us. Soon enough someone will find a better way to rank pages and if it happens not to be Google, we might start to see the decline of a giant!

  18. anandy on January 18th, 2011 at 10:10 am #

    gotcha thanks

  19. Silvia Salazar on January 22nd, 2011 at 12:09 am #

    PLEASE tell me how you follow someone on TWITTER!!! because i really want 2 do that i better get a answer tmro!if i dont i’ll sue u !got that ,and tell me how 2 create a Myspace acount wile ur at it pretty please?oh!i almost forgot, u should really watch that show Tosh.O !
    -Silvia

  20. AndoDoug on February 20th, 2011 at 11:08 pm #

    Great plan but how to get to the twitter direct message inbox you describe?

    • AndoDoug on February 21st, 2011 at 11:22 am #

      That was a question for another website lol. But my question is how do you get to where a direct message can be sent, they’re saying you have to go in through twitter.com’s main page to get to where you can actually mail the direct message (using your ingenius technique)

  21. Frances on March 14th, 2011 at 6:21 pm #

    Variation on the question. I have been doing “Reply” function on tweets from people who do not follow me. It appears to wrok in that there is no error msg. But, when I look detail of tweets on their profile, I never see my “Reply”. Do they get it or not? Or must I just @ them?

  22. Kevin on March 21st, 2011 at 1:10 pm #

    My friend used my computer to follow someone on twitter. The person that was being followed then sent me a message on facebook asking me to check out her facebook page. I am not friends with either person. The request was in my friend finders part of FB. How can that be possible when it was my friends twitter that was used, but on my computer. I am thinking that it was automatically generated or did the other person send it on purposed.

  23. Avenir on April 7th, 2011 at 4:52 am #

    I agree that know.. But that url not valid, please share how can i send free automatic twitter direct messages..

  24. CBFan1000 on April 10th, 2011 at 6:39 pm #

    I didn’t work for me!!! :’(

  25. Stu on May 7th, 2011 at 12:42 pm #

    Only if this worked it would be great! But making people click on this “help” page is wrong as it doesn’t work snd is misleading! I do wish that proper technological scientists find a way to send a DM to someone as I reallt want to send one of my friends a message but I can’t! :( That it doesn’t work!

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