How DM-able Are Twitter (X) Followers, Really? We Measured

Most of any X (Twitter) follower list cannot be messaged at all. Across our own scraping, only about 21 percent of a typical follower list can receive a DM. Verified followers run a little higher at around 25 percent, and keyword-search results are the most contactable at around 35 percent. If you have ever scraped a big list and wondered why your outreach stalls, this is usually why: you are counting people who never had a chance to see your message.

This is first-hand data from building and running an X scraper, not a public benchmark, because no public benchmark for this exists. Here is what we see, why it happens, and what it should change about how you run outreach.

The data: DM-able rate by source

When we scrape a source on X and check each profile's DM-ability, the share that can actually receive a cold DM breaks down roughly like this:

These are rounded estimates that shift by niche and by how the target account's audience is configured, but the ordering is consistent: search beats verified beats raw followers on contactability, while raw followers win on raw volume.

Why most followers can't be DMed

By default, X only delivers a DM from a stranger if the recipient has turned on "allow message requests from everyone," or if they already follow you. Plenty of accounts leave that setting off. So when you scrape 1,000 followers of a big account, something like 790 of them have simply closed the door to cold messages. It is not personal and no message quality fixes it; the message never arrives.

The pattern behind the numbers makes sense:

• General followers (~21%) are the broadest, least filtered group, so they include the most people who never open their DMs.
• Verified followers (~25%) skew slightly more toward active, public-facing accounts that keep DMs open.
• Keyword and search results (~35%) are people actively posting in public about a topic, and public posters are the most likely to keep open DMs, which is why search is the most contactable source even though the pool is smaller.

The cost angle nobody mentions

DM-ability also has a real cost, because the cheapest source to scrape is not the cheapest source of contactable leads. On X's data endpoints, a regular follower page returns far more profiles per call than a verified-follower page (in our measurements, roughly 200 per page for followers versus about 20 for verified, making verified leads around ten times costlier per profile fetched). But verified converts to DM-able at a higher rate.

Net it out and the cheapest source of an actual DM-able lead is usually keyword search, because it pairs a decent per-profile cost with the highest DM-able rate. Raw followers are cheap per profile but you pay to process four uncontactable people for every one you can reach. This is exactly why filtering for DM-ability at scrape time, rather than after, is what keeps outreach economics sane.

What a raw list of 20,000 actually gets you

The DM-able math has a direct parallel in cold email, where the whole list is technically reachable and volume still fails. A founder in r/Entrepreneur described the result of going wide:

"I spent like 2 months building out this whole outreach machine. Scraped leads, set up email sequences, sent thousands of cold emails ... we sent over 20,000 emails. Results? Like a 2% reply rate and most of those were 'unsubscribe me'."

On X the problem is worse before you even send, because most of that list cannot be messaged at all. Stack the two filters together, roughly four in five followers who are not DM-able, then a low reply rate on the few who are, and a raw 20,000-follower scrape collapses to a handful of real conversations. The number that matters was never the size of the list. It is how many contactable, well-matched people are in it.

What this should change about your outreach

Three practical consequences fall out of the data:

1. Filter for DM-ability before you write anything. Scraping a raw list and messaging blind means most of your effort lands on people who cannot receive it. Keep only DM-able profiles from the start.
2. Prefer search and verified when contactability matters more than volume. If you want the highest share of reachable, relevant leads, keyword search is the best-value source; raw followers are best when you need sheer scale and will filter hard.
3. Calculate your reply rate on DM-able leads, not the raw list. This is the big one. A campaign that looks like a 6 percent reply rate on 1,000 scraped followers may actually be closer to 30 percent on the ~210 who could receive the message. Measuring against the raw list makes genuinely good outreach look mediocre. For what a good number actually is, see our cold DM benchmarks.

How to apply it

The workflow that respects this data is simple: scrape a source, filter to DM-able profiles up front, and only then measure and message. XAutoDM does the filtering at scrape time with a can-DM filter across followers, verified followers, following, and keyword search, so your list is contactable before you write a word, and its analytics compute reply rate on the people who could actually be reached. For the code-level version of scraping with a

filter, see how to scrape X data with an API, or start from the follower scraper.

Method and caveats

These figures come from our own scraping across X in 2026 and are rounded estimates, not guarantees. DM-able rates move with the niche, the target account's audience, and X's evolving DM settings, so treat 21, 25, and 35 percent as ballparks that describe the shape of the problem, not fixed constants. The takeaway that holds regardless: the majority of any raw X list cannot be messaged, so filter first and measure against what is reachable.