Twitter q: Can we send a direct private message to someone without others seeing it?

[sinaisara]

They are not in the followers list. How can I send a direct message to them without it being seen publicly?

Thanks guys.

[sam m]

From what I know, you can't. Which I hate! I believe the only way to get DM option is if your following them and they are following u.

There was that bot for twitter horoscopes (Twittascopes I believe). They said you have to send them a DM on twitter to prevent the horoscopes from posting on your news feed. The problem was twittascope never followed anybody so no one had the DM option. I had to change my password and that fixed it. Point is, if there was a way to DM them, the twittascope users would have found a way to do this, but when I looked it up there was no way to DM them. Twitter has since changed a way to prevent twittascope from posting, unfortunately they have not (to my knowledge) changed DM rules.

[Mike Haydon]

You can only send a private direct message (DM) to someone who follows you, though you don't need to be following them.

The way people do it if they really need to DM the person is to @reply them with something like:

@reply I need to send you a DM, please follow me.

Then when they follow you, send them a DM.

Don't overuse this and only use it if you REALLY need to. If you abuse this, you can do a lot of damage to your online reputation.