Whether you’re looking to acquire more customers through Twitter outreach, network, warm up leads, or sell to your audience, we’ve put together this guide to help you maximize your Twitter presence and achieve your business goals.
Twitter DMs is a special communication channel, with significant advantages if used properly. Our customers experience higher response rates through DMs compared to just about all other types of outreach.
Twitter DMs outperform emails 3.5-7x in reply rates but require stricter anti-spam tactics
In this guide, we’ll go through the steps needed to send your first Twitter DM outreach campaign, along with some tips to ensure it goes well.
Before starting, we highly recommend you read our Twitter outreach best practices guide—it goes trough everything you need to know about setting up your profile before scaling your outreach. Get a few prerequisites right, and your reply rates will see a noticeable boost.
Set up your campaign on TweetDM
Link your X/Twitter account
Start by linking your account to your team. All your DMs will be synchronized anyour TweetDM account and team members.
If you plan on running your campaign from multiple accounts, you can easily link multiple Twitter accounts to be managed from the same TweetDM account.
Create a list of leads/prospects
The foundation of a successful DM campaign lies in its prospect list.
Combining manual profile research with automated scraping will yield you the best results.
Depending on your industry, you can take advantage of TweetDM’s Sales Navigator features, accessing a database of over 1.5 billion X/Twitter profiles. Where you can search by name, bio, and more to compile a list of the most promising leads.
And of course if you already have a list, you can import it directly into TweetDM.
Create a campaign
With your lead list finalized, it's time to create your campaign.
Go to the campaign section, click "Create," and name your campaign. Then, select your preferred list; you can choose as many lists as you want.
Make sure to toggle “Exclude” and select any lists you do not wish to send messages to, in case there are any overlaps. TweetDM automatically tracks your contacted and mutual conversations to prevent these conflicts.
Most often you’ll want to remove people you’ve reached out to in the past or people you simply have blacklisted.
Craft your message and sequence
Your message is the second most important lever of a successful campaign.
The better your message will resonate with your audience, the better your reply rate will be. Your message must be aligned with your prospects.
Timing and frequency
Best send times:
Weekdays 10-11 AM local time (38% open rate)
Avoid weekends (17% opens)
Follow-ups:
3-message sequence → 28-160% reply boost
Example:
Initial DM
"Following up – did this resonate?" (+2 days)
"Last try! Here’s a free resource: [link]" (+5 days)
Critical upgrades for your current draft
Add A/B Testing Section:
Test 3 message variants per 100 leads → 41% higher reply optimization
Example: Varied hooks (compliment vs. mutual connection vs. data-driven insight)
Include Spam Avoidance Tactics:
Never use URL shorteners (82% spam flag rate)
Once you get people replying to your message, it’s time to delegate. Read more about how you can delegate your Twitter Inbox.
Keep your initial openers at ≤ 40 characters. Why?
Preview optimizations
Only 30-40 characters of your DM are visible in Twitter’s preview pane .
Example: "Hey Sarah! Loved your AI pricing thread…" → 52% open rate vs. generic "Hi!" (14%) .
Attention spans:
Users decide to open/ignore DMs in <2 seconds .
Short hooks reduce cognitive load, increasing engagement by 3.5x .
Algorithmic filtering:
70% of cold DMs land in "message requests" .
ˆPersonalized openers (name + specific reference) bypass filters 2x more often
Further reading
Lumenwrites 2025 Cold DM Report
Reddit: Can you help me improve my cold DM Strategy for LinkedIn and Twitter?
Reddit: How to send a good cold DM to a VC on twitter
Sprout Social Timing Data
Twitter API Rate Limits