The most common way to find your friends on Twitter is by typing their username in Twitter’s search bar.
However, what if you want to follow, message, read, or respond to their tweets as soon as possible?
If you know their phone number, there’s another way to look for their Twitter profile.
Open up the Twitter app on the device where your friend’s phone number is saved, and then go to your account’s settings and privacy. Scroll to “Privacy and safety” and tap “Discoverability and contacts.” You will see the option to sync address book contacts; turn it on.
It’s as simple as that. But note that this won’t work if your friend doesn’t allow others to find them using their phone number.
If that is the case, you can try searching for them using their email address (if you know it) or their name. If both options didn’t work, you would need to ask them about their username.
Let’s talk about this in more detail.
How to Find Someone on Twitter by Phone Number
Years ago, it was not required for Twitter users to provide and verify their phone number because their email address was enough.
But to make the accounts more secure, a phone number has become almost necessary nowadays as it is used for two-step verification or multi-factor authentication.
When you link your phone number to your Twitter account, whenever someone—could be you or someone else—tries to log in to your account, Twitter will send a one-time pin needed to access your account.
This prevents hackers from accessing your data or controlling your account activities without your consent.
If your friend has enabled the option for anyone to find them using their phone number on Twitter, if you sync your contacts to your Twitter account, their profile will show up (assuming their phone number is saved on your phone).
To do that, here are the steps:
- Open the Twitter app on your mobile phone, tablet, or any device where the phone number is saved.
- Click on your profile picture in the top-left corner.
- Go to ”Settings & Support.”
- Click on “Settings and privacy.”
- Find “Privacy and safety” and tap that.
- Tap “Discoverability and contacts.”
- Toggle on the “Sync address book contacts” option.
If your friend still isn’t showing up after doing that, they might have turned off the option to be discovered using their phone number. Reach out to them instead and ask for their Twitter username; you could also ask for the link to their account.
How to Stop People From Finding You on Twitter by Phone Number
Did you know that hackers and spammers can save random phone numbers on their phones and use social media such as Twitter to find out who owns those numbers?
If you are worried about your safety and want to keep your phone number or identity private, it is better to disable it.
Disabling the option to be found using a phone number is similar to the process we discussed earlier.
But unlike with syncing contacts, you can manage your discoverability on a computer or a mobile browser—not just your mobile phone.
Just go to www.twitter.com, log in to your account, and then follow the steps:
- You need to open up Twitter in a browser or the Twitter app.
- Go to “Settings and privacy.”
- Click on the “Privacy and safety” option.
- Select “Discoverability and contacts.”
- Instead of syncing your address book contacts, turn off “Let others find you using your phone number” – you will find that under “Discoverability.”
You can also turn off “Let others find you by your email address” if you don’t want to be found using your email address. You will see that right above the phone number in the same section.
Conclusion
What makes Twitter different from other social media platforms is that it allows users to share their thoughts and express their feelings only in 280 characters or less, so things happen quickly and often without a thought.
Twitter is used mainly for rants and random thoughts. You will find lots of opinionated tweets on Twitter.
Having said that, because the platform isn’t really demanding and actually promotes short-form content and quick conversations, it is excellent for friends who want to talk to each other either privately via Twitter’s direct message feature or publicly by replying to their tweets, tweeting them, liking their tweets, or retweeting their tweets.
If you haven’t followed your friends yet, you can simply sync your contacts to your Twitter account if you don’t know their usernames or email addresses or if you don’t want to search for and follow them one by one.
You can sync your address book by going to your account’s “Discoverability and contacts.”
