Back in the early days of Twitter, smartphones weren’t as popular as they are now, and accessing sites on your tiny little phone was painful. Twitter allowed users to send and receive tweets via text message (SMS) and thankfully, has never removed this feature.
Why would you want to enable tweeting via SMS? Because when you have no 3G signal or wifi, it’s still very useful to be able to tweet or DM (more about that in a moment) to let others know what’s happening.
To set up SMS Twitter, first make sure your mobile number is saved in your mobile settings page then text START to your country’s number. For the UK, it’s 86444 or +447624800379. Follow the instructions that are sent to you, and that’s it!
You can choose to receive tweets from certain people that you’re following – just go to their profile and choose “Turn on mobile notifications” (or once you’ve set it up, text “ON [username]” to the code for your country.
There’s a huge list of the different commands available on the Twitter site, but possibly the most useful feature of texting to Twitter is the ability to send and receive direct messages. To send a message, you would put “d [username] [message]” – so to send a DM to our Twitter account, you would write “d bonjourblogger Hello!”
There’s lots more info about setting up and what you can do with Twitter via SMS over on their site, but it’s definitely something worth looking into setting up.
