On today’s Tech Help for Churches, Twitter: Longer DM messages
I wrote my book about Twitter (Tweeting Church) a few years ago and some things have changed. So over the next few weeks, I’m going to update some of those things.
[tweet “Because Twitter is recipient controlled, longer DMs could be a nice replacement for email.”]
First, let’s talk about DMs. I’ve said I’m a huge fan of the genius of the short 140 character message. With that said, direct messages, were often too short. Sometimes, try as you might, you can’t ask a question or get all the detail needed in an answer in only 140 characters. Of course, you could do multi-part messages, but that’s messy.
It’s actually a great thing that Twitter made the change to add longer messages.
Twitter is recipient controlled, so since you have to follow someone to get messages from them, you have better control than email.
It’s also nice to now know that you can let your thoughts flow and not be encumbered by the need for brevity.
If you want to know more of my thoughts about longer DMs, watch the video above.
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Transcript:On today’s tech help for churches longer twitter DM I will another episode of technical for churches the show every we can’t help you with the Internet and new media social media etc. for your church my name is Paul Alan Clifford on your host and love for you to join the conversation so just leave your question below the video now if you’re listening to the audio podcast no big deal just head over to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/TH FC or tech help for churches and then you can leave your comment under one of those videos there so you might know that I wrote a book on twitter and one of the downsides of being the church tech author consultants etc. is that stuff is always changing and this is no exception twitter is always adding new stuff and this is actually one that I wanted to address since I haven’t written about it before I haven’t talked about it before longer GM’s so before everything was 140 characters on twitter this spawned an industry of URL shortening hours the shorter the better because that would take so many of your characters will twitter change that to wear any URL took up the exact same amount of characters so that was good and it kind of affected things will likewise twitter has changed held direct messages work ease to be in the past that you had 140 characters no more but plenty less so you could use exactly hundred 40 characters or less to get your message across and sometimes you really need of more now I’ve talked in the past about strategies for stretching the amount of text you have in the message but when it comes to DM’s like a lot of times of the church tech questions BDM and I really need I need to know what kind of computer you’re using I need to know the build of the software and before you know it I met 160 characters and unlike just 20 over can I well 20 characters and I do all my tricks and sometimes I can sometimes I can’t will with this change and I know people generally don’t like change but with this change it becomes kind of like a private email system and it’s kind of useful because like unlike email I can control the interaction if I don’t follow someone they can’t I interact with me and vice versa so this is what I want to suggest to you this is a good change one and they can be very useful and let’s talk about how it can be used in your church but say people in your congregation foliar church twitter account and may have a question they have a church they have a prayer request etc. instead of hopping into their email client or sending a text message or what have you they can just send you a DM and it can be as long as it needs to be to get across what they’re dealing with a.m. having financial difficulties please pray for me if applied to this job this job in this job am waiting to hear from the second one the first one rejected me and the third one is offering me the job but it’s too little I just don’t know what to do see how that’s better than 140 characters now the reason that I think that it’s good that it’s restricted to GM’s is we get these huge messages in Twitter and part of the strength of twitter is you can plow through of the zillion messages really fast not got 40,000 followers and I follow probably 22,000 people back and as a result I can never read all the messages I can never read all the stuff on twitter but only a small fraction of those people send me direct messages and if it’s something that’s generic that’s not sent directly to me I can ignore it if it sent directly to me I can have a much richer conversation so I think in that it these this change is one that will help out and with the control you have where if you don’t fall than they can’t send you a message I think in some ways this is better than email I think that may be twitter has stumbled onto something where they’ll be able to get people to have a much better experience once then they will with email and maybe just maybe twitter will become a good replacement well I hope you like that content and I hope that it’s helpful to you I hope that now you know why you’re suddenly getting longer messages in your direct message older if you like this content type that you liked my email newsletter so head on over to TrinityDigitalMedia.com/gifts GIS TS and there you can pick up your free Church Tech gift including my book on twitter just a little hand and a free subscription to my email newsletter Darrell to be more tips and tricks and what you know all about the cool stuff that’s happening here@TrinityDigitalMedia.com including the launch of my community church attack you that’s CH you are CH TCH you short for university church Takeo.com and there you can get all my content along with your subscription it’s very inexpensive in fact I’m giving away just nearly everything the only thing that I’m not including in this is stuff that I have agreed with the publisher that they have just distribution rights over but other stuff is right there and then you can talk about you 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