Are You Making These Twitter Mistakes?

Twitter, like all social media, is all about relationships.  Do you have as many followers as you'd like?  Are people retweeting your tweets.  Are you building relationships or are you talking 'at' people.  How do you overcome this?  Simple – put yourself in your readers' shoes and think about what you'd like to hear from you.

Here are some deadly Twitter mistakes.

1.  Incomplete Profile

Does this mean you have to give up a bunch of personal details?  Not at all.  It does mean put a link to your site in your profile and tell, as much as possible, who you are in 160 characters.  If people are going to follow you they want to know a bit about who you are.  Make your profile as complete as possible.  BUT..

2.  Don't sell in your profile.

This is NOT the place to sell.  It's the place to let people get to know you.  Don't make your background all corporate-looking!  If you can personlize it to you – great.  But don't be overtly salesy in your profile or in your background.

3.  Following everyone who follows you.

Have you ever gotten  new followers and can't figure out who they are or why they are following you?  There are a lot of automatic follow apps out there.  Don't follow people indiscriminately.

4.  Automated Tweets 

This is such a bad idea that I could talk about it for a LONG time.  I am not talking about apps like Hootsuite (I LOVE it) that allow you to create individual tweets by you in advance.  That is a real time-saver.  I'm talking about tweeting a feed (other than your newest blog post).  When you tweet RSS feeds you are not adding any value to your followers.

5.  Automatic Welcome Message 

Oh yikes – I hate to have my e-mail cluttered with automatic thank you messages for following someone.  And worse than that – an automatic thank you with an offer in it!  Just say no to automated welcome messages.

6.  Drive-by Tweets

I know you've seen them.  Someone bothers to get on Twitter for 10 minutes and cranks out 100 tweets and then is gone again for days at a time.  Is that adding value for your followers?  I think not.  Spread out your tweets.  Be kind to your followers.

Your Social Media Manager