Yesterday, Twitter announced a series of improvements for doing social customer care over Twitter. I was obviously excited about this, given my passion for social customer care and desire to help people. One of the most important and exciting parts of their announcement is the ability to include a ‘call to action’ button in the tweet to take the conversation private over direct message (DM). I still see a good amount of people who don’t know how to initiate a DM and this new feature make it much easier for brands to carry the conversation over as the customer will just need to tap the “Send a private message” button.
This feature is now embedded in a few customer care platforms such as SparkCentral, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Respond, among others, and I’ve already seen @DeltaAssist include it in several of their replies to passengers; but you don’t need to use those systems, or even be a company to take advantage of this new feature. To use it, you just need to add the following link at the end of a tweet, and it will automatically create the CTA button.
https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id={your account’s numeric user ID}
(Do NOT include the account number brackets on the link, they’re just there as a placeholder)
To find your twitter ID, go to http://tweeterid.com/ and type in your username, your ID will be displayed on the right. According to Twitter, you need to make sure that you have “Accept DM’s from anyone” enabled for it to work; I have not yet tried it with the option disabled.
You can also pre-fill a certain text into the DM, for example, to request an order number. Just append &text={default text} to the end of the URL and replace {default text} with the text you’d like to pre-fill.
Example: https://twitter.com/messages/compose?recipient_id={your account’s numeric user ID}&text=Order%20Number
In the link above, the text “Order Number” will be appended to the DM so that the customer only needs to put in the order number in (as well as any other information you’ve requested or a description of the problem) and send the DM. The %20 is the encoded version of a space. You can enter any relevant text you want to pre-fill.
Note: If when you tweet, Twitter is not converting the link into a button, make sure you have DM’s enabled from anyone. Various people have mentioned that fixes it. Also, make sure you have no spaces on your link.
I’m curious to hear how you & your business will implement this feature, so drop me a line or a comment on how its being used when you implement it – would love to hear your use case!
h/t @TimHaines for letting me know this is open to anyone