The more I use Social Media and in particular Twitter, the more I realise how valuable this platform is to my business. There is a definite correlation between the number of tweets I chirp to the amount of traffic to my main website. Not too sure why because the traffic isn’t coming from Twitter per se but on days where I tweet more, I get many more hits. Mostly from search engines too.
If there’s a tame SEO expert out there that can shed their opinions on this I’d love to hear them.
There aren’t any hard rules like “do this and you’ll be a millionaire by Christmas” but there are bear traps and pitfalls to be aware of. These are just some of my own, personal thoughts based on the way I use the platform. It’s not perfect and I know I could be using it much more effectively, but here they are nevertheless…
Twitter – Uses and Abuses, My Personal Thoughts
It’s all about engagement, not followers
Many people get caught up in the idea that they absolutely have to have thousands of followers. I don’t believe it is. It’s more important to engage with other users rather than simply broadcast to thousands of people who arent’ listening.
There are even pay services around where you can buy twitter followers if you so desire. I would argue that this is a waste of money. Surely it’s far better to gain followers organically by tweeting about things that interest them than simply paying for followers that have no interest in your product or service?
There is an interesting side-effect to all this too. With the advent of platforms such as Klout that supposedly measure one’s influence on the various social media networks. The paid follower services can have an adverse effect on your score. The way they work is to follow you for a short time and if you haven’t followed them back in a few days they’ll unfollow you and move onto someone else. This will reflect badly on you because it puts your follower attrition rate up.
Don’t just blindly follow everyone who follows you…
Whenever someone follows me I have certain criteria they must meet before I’ll follow them back.
If their followers exceed their tweets then it’s an automatic no, especially if their followers are an order of magnitude or more greater than their tweets. Why? Because this is likely to be someone who can’t be bothered to tweet to gain followers or some kind of tweet spam attack.
In the case of the latter it’s normally, supposedly, from a very pretty girl who wants sex. Dread to think who has really sent the message.
There is an exception to this though – celebrities and twitter celebrities will very often have a very large following.
The curse of the auto-tweet
This is a real bug bear of mine. I have receiving an auto tweet when I follow someone, thanking me for following them. They have absolutely no idea who I am. It’s not personal and it’s not being social. It normally results in an immediate un-follow from me.
The delayed tweet
Hot on the heels of the auto-tweet comes the delayed tweet. You can pre-load your tweets and schedule them to go at certain times when you know your target audience will be listening. This is becoming increasingly popular with social media marketing and I’ve even used it myself from time to time when I’ve known I’m going to be unable to post myself.
I’m still undecided by it’s effectiveness and I think overuse is detrimental to the cause, but provided there are sufficient real tweets going out it could be useful. I’ve yet to take a booking though.
Delayed tweets are easy to spot because they normally get tagged with the platform they’re sent from such as TweetDeck or HootSuite.
Tweeting by proxy
I couldn’t believe this when I first heard about the practice. Proxy tweeting occurs when someone is too busy to tweet themselves and gets someone else to do it form them. I can understand it from the perspective of a large corporation but not on a personal level.
For example the corporation may have a team of people tweeting on behalf of the company or brand, in the name of that organisation. It would also work well for a content provider such as news channels, media and magazines. Local services could also benefit and it would work well.
Not for the individual though. It you market yourself through twitter as a person, not a brand, then it really should be the person tweeting, not a proxy. I met a gentleman at a networking event recently who delegates all his tweets to his cleaner which I thought was amusing – his on-line personality was significantly more interesting than meeting him face to face. Maybe it does work after all 😉
Beware the forum troll
The forum troll. I’m sure you know the type. They “own” the form and hide behind a faceless textbox. At all costs they *have* to have the last word and they are always right. They snipe away at new users and woe betide anyone who dares to ask a simple question. It’ll invite a tirade of abuse about using the search feature or dyor or rtfm or some such. It’s probably why I don’t use forums very often.
I haven’t seen this so much on twitter but there are a few out there. They pop up once in a while and no matter what you say there will be an argument.
If you’re building a brand presence and a following for your business it’s not always a good idea to get sucked in, even if they are wrong.
After thoughts…
Without a doubt, social media and in particular twtiter can be a very powerful tool. It can also be a curse too. Once you start you have to keep feeding the monster or the followers will drift away. By creating a following, you’re creating a community. That community needs to be nurtured and cared for. It needs to be fed with interesting snippets of information or it’ll whither and die.
Folllow me, @theLightMatters on twitter… http://twitter.com/theLightMatters
