I’ve gotta get something off my chest: I really hate it when I follow someone and they have a service automatically send me a direct message with either a welcome message, a marketing message, or a generic empty message.
A humble suggestion: if you are going to auto-DM someone, please make the message read like a double opt-in email. Explain your frequency of tweets. What subjects you’ll be discussing. What you’re passionate about. Please try to avoid racking up “follows” on other social networks (ie, “Hey d00d! Friend me on Facebook http://bit.ly/imsofreakingawesome!”), seeing crappy marketing messages (ie, “Learn how you can turn your Twitter followers into a palladium alloy!”) or worse yet, generic attempts at being personal (ie, “Hey, thanks for following. I can’t wait to read your tweets!”).
As an aside, I know the last one is patently false. Anyone that’s read tweets from @sbolen knows that the frequency is high, the subject matter varies from baseball to football (PG-13, Strong Language, some Violence – depending if my teams are playing the Cubs or Steelers), being a dad, housework, travel, work, design, coding, et cetera. Not very interesting things — certainly not warranting that kind of enthusiasm.
Please. Stop the madness. Stop the auto-DMs.
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