Yesterday I received this question from reader Ariola:

Is there any way to tweet only to a defined group and not to all of the friends?

I wrote back to Ariola yesterday, saying that I wasn't aware of any tools that allowed you to do that. The only way I could think it would work was by sending Direct Messages to the smaller group, so other followers wouldn't see the tweet, but I didn't know any way to send Direct Messages to several people at the same time.*

Then I had a thought. You could do this by creating a second, separate Twitter account and in the Settings, check the box to protect your updates, which means you have to approve anyone who wants to follow you. Then you could tell your friends to request to follow that account and, when you sent a tweet from it, only those people would see it.

Note that this is only a really practical solution if you're talking about restricting tweets to the same group of people each time. If you want to send one tweet only to John, Joe, and Mary and another one only to Louise, Sally, and Frank, you'd need separate accounts for each of those groups. So you might be able to manage this for a few small groups, but any more than that would be pretty unwieldy.

The other VERY IMPORTANT thing to note is that if I receive a tweet from someone who has protected his/her account, there's nothing to prevent me from replying to that tweet or retweeting it, which would make it appear in my timeline and therefore all my followers would now see it as well. So you certainly can't be sure that other people will never see those tweets.

* As often happens, not long after I wrote back with this reply, I stumbled onto something else that may help. I had received a tweet that came from something called "4groups." So I clicked that link and it took me to a site called—wait for it—Twitter for Groups!

On the page where they describe how to Create a Private Group, the first few steps are similar to what I've spelled out above re. creating a new account and protecting your updates. But apparently, after that, when you use their service, it will send your tweets from that account as Direct Messages to the approved followers.

The advantage of this approach is that when you get a DM, you don't get automatic links to reply or retweet the post, making it a little harder to pass the message on to others. But, of course, there's nothing stopping somebody from copying and pasting the tweet to their own followers, so make sure members of your group are people you can trust to keep the tweets private.

The site has another advantage because, if any member of the group sends a DM to that account, it will automatically be sent to all the other members as a DM as well. So you could use this service as a way to carry on interactive group conversations using Twitter, without having the rest of the Twitterverse becoming involved.

I haven't had a chance to test out the service myself so, if you've used it and have comments about it, please send them my way and I'll update this post. Likewise, if you know of any other ways to have this functionality, I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks for the question, Ariola!

Posted in How To,Reader Questions,Social Media,Twitter