Twitter Habits – Advice

 
Really good stuff from Mitch Monsen over on SearchEngineJournal.com
Twitter is an amazing tool – communication, marketing & networking all in one, and if you use it right, you can really drive traffic to wherever you need it to go.
As Mitch says,.. “there are hundreds of ways to build your influence on Twitter, find new friends and business contacts, and contribute positively to the social world” and in turn, that will improve your business visibility and get you more leads.
However, used badly, it’s also very easy to get it wrong and  to look like a spammer, and we all know what we think about those 😉
Over to Mitch again…
“I’ve compiled a list here of all of the “conventional wisdom” that “social media gurus” and “marketing experts” have offered that drench your Twitter account in the stink of spam.

Direct Message Autoresponders

If I follow you, it’s not because I’m hoping you’ll send me your free eBook. The generic “Hey, thanks for following!” DM is a good idea, but it completely loses its authenticity when it’s automated.”
I totally agree – automation is not the right way to approach any of your social media marketing – it sends out all the wrong messages about you and your business. Direct message autoresponders are never a good idea. Ever.
If you want to send a new follower a direct message, use their name. I prefer to thank them for the follow in the stream and to strike up a conversation that way.

Auto Follow-Back

Here’s Mitch’s take –
“I know you want more followers. We all do. But blindly following everyone that follows you isn’t the way to get good ones. It seems like every other social media tool allows you to auto-follow everyone that follows you, but this does little more than open you up to phishing scams, spam followers, and an unmanageable Twitter feed.
If I’m looking for some new SEO tweeps to follow and your follower to following ratio is 1:1 or close to it, I’m probably not going to follow you.”
Interesting – but the watchword here is common sense . Don’t autofollow. Go through those who have followed you that day and follow back if the account looks like one you want to follow. Simples!

Tweeting Inspirational Quotes

Mitch doesn’t like them…
“If your feed is purely composed of “inspirational” quotes, I’m unfollowing you.
Inspirational quotes are stomachable in moderation, but if that’s all your feed is, you look like a spammer. This is a common feature for “filler” tweets, especially in social media posting services (a la Buffer), which has undoubtedly contributed to the quotespam proliferation. Again, a sin of automation.”
Yep – all that sits okay with me too – although I’m not quite as disciplinarian as him on this one. The odd great quote I like! Moderation. my friends.

Bulk Tweets

Big no no. Might as well just add #bot to your bio 😉
“If you drop a 10-tweet bomb on me, it doesn’t increase the likelihood that I’ll notice you and click one of your links. It increases the likelihood that I completely ignore your tweets or unfollow you.
I don’t even know where this comes from. I can understand an unusually high concentration of tweets in the morning when you’re reading your bloglist, but 5+ tweets at exactly the same time? Someone enlighten me, because this is one of the most irritating Twitter habits I’ve ever seen.”
Again, I can think of worse things, but if are thinking sensibly about what people want to hear from you, you’ll know this doesn’t make sense. It falls into the “broadcast” category and that is not what you should be doing. Remember – Listen, Learn, Care & Serve is the Twitter mantra we preach here (we learnt it a while back from the fabulous @Pistachio) and so if you stop shouting (metaphorically I mean) for a moment and just listen to what’s going on, you’ll find the people and the conversations that matter to you and your business.
Read Mitch Monsen’s full article on Search Engine Journal here