Twitter has announced Fast Follow in India, enabling you to receive Twitter messages from any Twitter users on your phone without even having a Twitter account.
The service is currently available only on Airtel and Videocon network and you can follow any of the Twitter accounts by simply sending ‘Follow <username>’ to 53000.
For example, in order to follow Pluggd.in tweets, simply send Follow pluggdin to 53000.
Twitter Vs. SMSGupshup
We earlier had a smsgupshup account (and then Google SMS Channel), but stopped promoting our accounts owing to
a) Delivery Schedule – sometimes, smsgupshup messages used to get deliver late in the night, which resulted in several of our subscribers asking us to look into the matter, as it was creating quite a bit of irritation.
b) Unreliable Delivery – Google SMS Channel worked for most of the times, but there was no reliability in the delivery.
What Twitter’s Fast Follow does is that it helps increase your subscriber base to non-Twitter users and gives more incentive for any brand/publisher to promote their channel (just the way they are promoting Facebook pages).
Follow @pluggdin on Twitter. or simply send Follow pluggdin to 40404 for updates via SMS.
Update: India short code is 53000 and the Fast Follow feature is available only to Airtel and Videocon network subscribers.
Would be interesting to see if they can beat the volume Vs reliability issues.
Is it Vodafone or Videocon network that supports this feature?? coz twitter is officially available on SMS only with airtel and videocon
Thanks for that ! It’s Videocon – have updated.
znisms.com has group facility where you can make groups and than users can join the groups by sending SMS as JOIN groupname to 5607008 but sending SMS is a paid service and pretty costly too. The best part timely delivery and our own brand everywhere, but it might not suite pluggd.in.