Last Friday, Twitter announced a number of exciting new API features for developers including a much-anticipated refresh of their direct messaging APIs. These APIs are particularly interesting since they allow businesses to have rich, private, direct message conversations with their customers over Twitter.

For the past few months, we've been in stealth-mode, working with the team at Twitter to bring support for direct messaging to Smooch. I’m really excited to finally be able to introduce it to the world following Twitter’s announcement.

Introducing Twitter DM for Smooch

Starting today, Twitter DM is now available as a customer channel on Smooch. This means that anyone building on the Smooch platform can start adding Twitter DM features to their software using the same unified API that already powers conversations over Facebook Messenger, Viber, WeChat, Web, SMS and more.

Channel capabilities

The Twitter DM integration is very rich and supports many capabilities of the Smooch platform such as sending and receiving images, GIFs and emojis. A business can also send quick replies, location request and rich carousel messages which get automatically translated to fit Twitter’s message-display capabilities. For a full list of what this new channel is capable of, check out our channel capabilities grid.

The state of the Twittersphere

Twitter is an awesome place to engage with your audience, offer customer service and personalized experiences. There are currently 319 million monthly active users on the platform, and of those 100 million are active daily.

Unlike many other social channels, Twitter is often the go to destination for customers to reach out when having issue or complaint with a product or service (especially when they're unfairly dragged off airplanes! 😡). To date, companies providing service over Twitter have had much of their individual communication take place in public, limiting the depth of care and attention they can provide to their customers.

With this new integration, it’s now easier than ever to offer the ability to turn public conversations into a private ones, better serve customers in need, and turn detractors into loyal users with delightful personalized experiences.

One of the champions of customer service on Twitter is Apple. Apple launched their @AppleSupport account in March last year and since then have grown a following of 621 000 users. They’ve been able to create a great experience, even when customers are facing issues by answering them in minutes on a private, personalized channel where Apple can go the extra-mile on a case by case basis.

How do I use it?

Due to account limits put in place by Twitter during their beta period, we're restricting access to the channel to companies building software on the Smooch API. If this describes your business, please contact Twitter mentioning you're a Smooch customer to get priority access.

Alternately, if you already have a whitelisted Twitter app for the Activity API you can already connect it via our Integration API and start building Twitter DM features inside your software.

We’re really excited to see what conversational experiences you’ll build over Twitter and look forward to providing broader access to the channel as it's rolled out.

For more details about these new Twitter API features and Twitter API roadmap, check out these useful links:

• Twitter's blog post on new API features
• Twitter's published API roadmap
• Twitter automation rules and best practices