Connor BrookeAs with all social media sites, Twitter is a fickle beast. Treat it well and you’ll reap
great success from the investment. Treat it and your followers badly… Well, let’s just say it’ll be worse that if you hadn’t joined at all.
There’s a certain etiquette to follow on Twitter, not to mention many things you can do to achieve good levels of engagement, followers and shares. However what’s perhaps more important to recognise is what not to do on the network. With that in mind, here are our five top tips for what NOT to do on Twitter…
1) Brag
Hey, you! Have you seen what my company did yesterday? Better yet, did you see what we did today? Wanna know what we’re up to tomorrow? How about next week? Anybody? No?
NO! Don’t do it. Don’t use Twitter as a tool just to push your company and its products or services. Don’t use all of your tweets to brag. Sure, if you’ve had a big success, then shout about it – once. Surround this tweet by those that add value to your followers’ lives; sharing useful, relevant content. Otherwise, you’ll risk losing followers and all hope of engaging with those you do keep hold of.
2) Auto-respond to new followers
Got a new follower? Don’t send them an automated tweet or direct message. It just isn’t cool. Treat them as an individual. If you really value their follow, then treat them with the respect they deserve and respond to them personally. Why not take a look at what they tweet about and use this information to personalise your message? Starting the relationship off right will only prove beneficial to your brand later down the line, so it’s really worth that extra time and effort.
3) Over-tweet
Don’t bombard your followers’ timelines with tens of tweets every day. Stats show that over 400 million tweets are posted on Twitter every day. Don’t become part of the white noise. Updating your page around five – seven times each day will be sufficient and remember, don’t tweet for the sake of it. Regular updating is necessary, admittedly, but you should only speak up when you have something valuable to say. Make each tweet count.
4) Force-feed
Made a new acquaintance on Twitter? Don’t force-feed them your content. Take a look at the type of things they share (which will give you an insight into what’s important to them) and take the time to find a piece of content you’ve made that truly matches their interests. Do read some of their own work and make reference to it when sharing your own; don’t just rock up with a piece of content and throw it at them, otherwise your engagement levels will suffer.
5) Automatically follow back
Don’t just follow someone because they follow you. Although some consider it the decent thing to do, when representing a brand on Twitter, it’ll simply make you look spammy and like you’re just after more followers. Gaining more followers is great, of course, but you should only follow people that will add value to your account – industry influencers/leaders, for example and the specialists working for your company. Take a moment to think about what that follow will really do for your account before hitting the button.
Thanks to favin.com & mashable.com for the images
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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I really want to add:
6. Post directly from Facebook – seeing that fb… link in a tweet just makes me facepalm. Why would anyone want to follow you on both if your content is identical and why would anyone click the “I just posted 5 photos to my album on Facebook” link?
Great post :)