Direct Mesasge

carmony · 2012-01-11T13:10:23.000Z

Our site is a car resale website www.carmony.co.uk. We service over 2,200 dealerships across the UK and give each of these dealers has their own dedicated home, search results page and car detail page on our site.

Consumers who visit our site and who are interested in a particular vehicle can currently contact the dealers either by a dedicated number, which is mapped to the number on their own website, or by email. (see example http://www.carmony.co.uk/en/used-car/audi-a4-diesel-avant_2613631)

I am looking at new ways to expand the way consumers can enquire about a vehicle from the dealers, which will improve the number of enquiries a dealer gets, will introduce the dealers to the advantages of social media and will also further develop the dealers - and consumers - ability to communicate using social signals about stock the dealer has.

My idea is to introduce a twitter button next to the dealers dedicated phone number on our the dealers car detail page, which the visitor can choose to click and which would send a Direct Message to the dealers twitter page, which the sales team would monitor. To clarify, the DM would essentially be for the sales team to read and respond to enquiries about vehicles at that dealership.

The clear advantage of this for the consumer is that they can initiate dialogue about a car and remain in contact on the go via hand held devices. The advantage to the dealer is they can gain access to new and returning clients and follow through to sale communications via twitter. They can also use social CRM tools to track, monitor and better assign social media activity to the initial DM.

My question is, can Direct Messaging be set up using an API to automatically send a DM to a dealer without the sender or receiver of the message needing to follow each other first?

If it’s not possible to do that, is it possible to generate an API that will trigger an Authentication prompt that informs the sender of the DM that by accepting to send the DM, they give authority to automatically follow the recipient?

Please advise.

Please feel free to contact me on 07795 445157 if you need some more information.

Thanks

Luke

kurrik · 2012-01-12T01:32:11.000Z

The recipient of a DM needs to follow the sender. In your case, the dealer would need to follow the customer to receive the initial inquiry, and the customer would need to follow the dealer in order to receive a response.

It is possible to write an integration which asks the customer to authorize access to their account, and to set up a mutual following relationship + initial DM. Be aware that there are limits around how many people one account may follow (see https://support.twitter.com/articles/68916-following-rules-and-best-practices) so this would have to be taken into consideration given your projections for use of the feature. A popular dealer may hit a following limit after many inquiries.