By Roger G. Best

Twitter has proven to be a great tool for everything from simply keeping in touch through developing new clients and developing brand loyalty.  And the number of followers we have almost touches that place of pride (o.k., almost may be hedging this just a bit) as that number grows.  But it’s important to know your audience when you make your decisions about tweeting habits because what your friends want to know is quite different from those who are following your business tweets.  Regardless, there are some things that will cause your followers to unfollow you.

There’s also the possibility that you can be followed, while still being fairly ignored.  Depending up how deep you are into this Twitter thing the thought may have crossed your mind; “How do I keep up with all these tweets?”  I found (even before I reached the point of following 100 people) that the chatter got so loud that I was missing all the things that I really wanted to get.  That caused me to look into some of the tools that were available to manage my Tweeps.  This is a topic for another article, but it’s important to understand that it is possible to filter out the chatter and that you don’t want to be one of those that are being filtered out.  Our goal is to gain followers that are in our target audience.  That goal is achieved by doing some things right.  If we don’t, we may end up being unfollowed, or filtered to the point of being ineffective.

1. Automatic Direct Messages (DMs):  I’ve listed this first because it’s among the first bit mistakes you can make.  At first blush, using Auto DM’s may seem like a good thing but most people frown on the practice.  If you really want to lose followers, add a marketing pitch to that Auto DM.  Think about the caveats here; you’ve just trusted someone enough to follow them and they immediately add to your mailbox load.  Just say “no”.
2. Politics, Religion and Sex:  This might work if your profile clearly states one (or all) of these as your purpose, or if your profile clearly states that you are a DJ or commentator.  You might also get by with this if your followers are all close friend and at least somewhat like-minded.  But outside those parameters, you are begging to be unfollowed.  The truth be known, I’ve even had a close relative get up from the dinner table on Thanksgiving Day because one of the aforementioned topics came up and things went sour fast.  If you’re using this tool for business, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that such topics and quickly offend, or annoy, some portion of your followers.
3. Links Only: Please, Please, Please; give us some idea as to what we might find on the other side of that link.  Sure, we only have 140 characters to work with so space is at a premium, but when all we see is some shortened link, it’s likely that you’ll hit the ignore list pretty quickly.
4. Unintelligible @replies:  How often have you opened your Twitter feed and found something like “@whomever ROFLOL” or “@whomever when did you hear that”.  Even worse, have you ever clicked on someone profile that just followed you trying to see if you were interested in following them back, to be faced with a sting of those?  I have to admit that those profiles never get my follow and if I see many messages like that hitting my screen, they will be unfollowed quickly.  Try to give a little context in your @replies so it doesn’t seem like noise.  Too much noise and people will find a way to filter it out.
5. Over Marketing:  O.K., I know that many of us use Twitter with hopes of growing our business and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But very few, if any, are interested in following you just so they can hear about your “hot deals”.  Twitter is about sharing something of value, which your specials may actually be valuable, but what your followers are hoping for will probably have more substance.  For example, if you are a travel agent and I follow you, I’m happy to hear about your great deals, but I also want to read about the things that affect my travels (the hurricane that’s building, or which airlines are going to charge me for checked luggage and which ones are not, etc.).  Offer something that will make your followers anxious to read your tweets beyond the great deal and they won’t filter you out before you offer then THE great deal.
6. Public, vs Private Tweets:  Public forums are a great place to think about public vs. private consumption.  If you just read a great blog about something in your industry and others have chosen to follow you because of you have access to that information, you can probably assume that this is good information for public consumption.  But if you are thinking about lunch and you want @judyjbest to go with you, a DM would be much more appropriate than making that invite a public one.

I could probably go on but this particular message is getting long.  My primary reason for stopping here is that my number 7 item may have been something about tweeting something with a link to a blog that is just WAY too long.

Have a great day,

Roger

This entry was posted on Monday, August 31st, 2009 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.