Should you DM a creator or email them?

The profile is open in one tab and the finished message is in the other. Under the name there's a line with an email address in it. Somebody on your team asks whether the message goes there or gets sent as a DM.

The message is already written. It says what the job is and where the video goes up, whether it's paid, and when it has to happen — the three facts that decide whether anyone can answer you. The job is one video about a cat water fountain, the kind quiet enough to leave in a bedroom, for an account that is almost entirely one cat.

What's actually on the profile?

Read the line under the name before you answer, the same way you read the rest of the page. This is the page you were already reading when you picked this person.

You're looking for one thing: whether they've put a way to reach them on it. There are three answers.

• A way to reach them, typed into the bio. An address, or a line saying where to write.
• No way to reach them typed in the bio, but a link — a site, or somewhere listing a few places.
• Neither. Nothing under the name but the account.

That third one is a fact about the page, and for that profile it's the answer.

A DM is the other route. The page names it only when the line under the name says to write there.

For the fountain: there's an address under the name. The page named that.

So which one do you use?

Start with what the page named, and notice there's something else that isn't on the page at all: an address you assembled.

You can end up with an address they never posted on this profile, including one they posted somewhere else. Which way you got it is beside the point here. What matters is that it isn't what this page named: they put the bio line there, and you put yours together.

So there's an order, and it comes off the page rather than out of a preference: use the route the profile names. Where the bio names a way to reach them, use it. Where it has a link instead, use what the link leads to.

Where it has neither, the page names nothing, and more reading won't change that. There's nothing left to rank, and what you do next is your call.

An address you assembled was never named by this page. Nothing here rules it out; it goes after the ones that were, because a first send to a place they published is one the page itself accounts for.

For the fountain: the bio address, then. You also have an address you assembled, and it stays unsent.

What does the route change about what you send?

The three facts stay the same, and the test they answer to — "is this a fact they need in order to answer you, and can't get anywhere else?" — doesn't move just because the message went one way instead of the other.

What moves is who the message comes from.

In a DM, that's one of your accounts. Your name is attached to it, so go look at that account before you send, the way somebody who has never seen it would.

In an email, it's an address of yours. That's a name and a domain, and ahead of everything else you wrote there's a subject line.

If the bio sent you to a link, ask the same question of whatever you found there: what will be doing the sending?

For the fountain: your account has four posts, three of them the product on a white background. That's the sender in a DM. To the address, the sender is a name on a domain — and there's a subject line nobody has written yet.

If nothing comes back, what is the silence covering?

Nothing you can read off it. That doesn't change, and neither does the list of three things that could be behind it. One of the three is the one where the message "never became a decision at all," and the same guide says where the route sits in relation to it: the route is the one thing about that cause you can change.

So the silence weighs the same whichever route you used. What differs is what it's a silence from.

A week of nothing from the address the page named is a week from a place this account published, and it was the page's own answer that went into it.

A week of nothing from an address you assembled is a week from a place this account never published — and where the page named something, that answer is still unspent.

For the fountain: the bio address is the one you spent, and the other address is still yours rather than theirs. A week of nothing doesn't change whose it is.

Is sending it the other way a second try?

No. A second message earns its send when it changes what the person is being asked to decide — a fact the first message left out or got wrong, or a different question. That list has two things on it, and the route is neither. "Anything else is the same question arriving twice."

Sending somewhere else is still a real move, and it already has a home. That guide takes the question and prices it: "If that route is also quiet, you've learned no more than you knew, which is why it should cost you a minute and no more."

On day one there's no silence to explain and no fact to fix, so the move has nothing to do.

Send both ways at once and you've put one message out twice, and spent the minute anyway.

For the fountain: the bio address, once. If the launch date moves next week, that's a fact that changed, and the follow-up goes to the same place with the fact fixed.

Frequently asked questions

They answered the DM. Where does the offer go?

Wherever they answered from.

The reply names the route: that's the one with a conversation in it now. The offer is the heavier of the two messages, the one that arrives with the terms and a number settled inside it, and sending it to an address you also happen to have starts a second thread while a live one is open. If something does have to move somewhere else later, say so before it moves.

We're writing to twenty creators. Do we open twenty profiles?

For the message, the per-creator part is already settled: run the test per creator, not per campaign. For the route, it depends on what the list tells you.

If the addresses arrive as a list and nothing on it says which came off a bio and which somebody put together, then yes — open them, because the pages are the only place that answer is. Until somebody looks, the route has been settled for all twenty by default. If the list does say, you already have what opening the pages would have told you.

See what this looks like for your brand

Got a message written and no answer on where it goes? Bring the profile and the message and we'll work out where it lands.

Or email us: business@popow.ai