You Can Now Receive Direct Messages From Anyone

Twitter announced yesterday that users will have the option to receive direct messages from any user.

The feature was originally introduced in 2013 but only made available to a subset of people. This time however, Twitter will make the option available to Twitter’s 288 million active monthly users, with the social network making it available to people throughout yesterday. Users can check off “Receive direct messages from anyone” on the “Security and privacy” settings page.

For Twitter users who didn’t have the feature till now, direct messaging was limited: You could only send messages to users who followed you, and you could only receive messages from users you followed.

Even though it may seem trivial, it’s another small tweak in Twitter’s recent attempts to have users message each other more, and in turn, boost engagement – particularly amongst brands and businesses. This strategy is going to be crucial if Twitter is going to reach its bold, “strictly hypothetical” goal of 14 billion dollars in annual revenue in the next decade.

Over the last few months, Twitter has released various new features and tweaks for its services.