I’m excited to open up the floodgates and see what kind of direct messages I get on Twitter from people I don’t yet follow. Sure, some will be spammers but I don’t care, the others will make up for it. How can I set up my Twitter account to accept all DMs?
You are a braver person than I am, I have to say. Yes, Twitter now has a setting that lets you accept direct messages from anyone in the Twitterverse, whether you’re following them — or they’re following you — or not. I expect that we’ll start to see scammers and spammers simply monitoring the public feed and sending out an automatic DM to each public twitter user. Doesn’t fill me with confidence that we’re gong to see a lot of valuable additions to our personal Twitter streams.
But then again, I could be wrong and allowing anyone to send you a DM might be an avenue to getting lots of interesting new people to show up on your radar, and it’ll end up all good.
In any case, it’s your choice to make, so let me show you how to change your settings and if it’s outta control, it’s easy enough to change it back. 🙂
To start, get to your Settings:
Once you’re there, on the left side is a list of different areas you can tweak and tune.
Choose Security and privacy:
The results are a page full of settings and options. What you want is at the very bottom:
Tip: If you don’t see this, wait a day and try again. Seems like Twitter might be rolling this out to accounts day by day. I had a few days delay until it showed up for me, even though I was already reading about this update to the Twitter account settings.
You’ll want to check the box adjacent to Receive Direct Messages from anyone.
You sure? Click “Save changes“.
Twitter then asks that you confirm your account password, a nice validation:
Click again on “Save changes” and if everything goes smoothly, you’ll see:
That’s it. Done.
Now don’t expect a huge wave of DMs in the next few minutes. In fact I changed this days ago and haven’t see a single DM. So we’ll see how it goes…