5 Twitter Mistakes to Avoid
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Published with permission from the author. Read the original post here.
As Twitter grows to encompass almost 200 million users and businesses display almost as many Twitter icons as Facebook icons on their websites, you’d think that companies are starting to figure out how to better utilize Twitter to inform and truly engage with the public. While there are success stories of businesses on Twitter who are finding their own path in social media, it still amazes me as to how many ways businesses can improve upon their Twitter presence and stop making the common mistakes I often see. I wanted to share some of my ideas with you on five quick and easy ways many businesses can immediately improve upon their current Twitter presence.
5 Common Mistakes Your Business Makes on Twitter and Ideas on How to Improve Them
1) Put a Human Face on Your Tweets
Let’s face it: Social media was made for people, not companies. This puts businesses at a distinct disadvantage in social media, in which Twitter is no exception. How best can you "humanize" your tweets coming from a business profile? How about put pictures of the faces of the people that are tweeting on behalf of your company on the Twitter background and have your employees use their initials at the end of each tweet? For a good example, albeit they use avatars instead of real photos, check out the Microsoft Support team page.
2) Are You Monitoring Your Following Versus Followers Ratio?
Your Twitter Following versus Followers ratio is an important indication of your willingness to be social. Let’s look at the following scenarios:
0 Following, 1,000,000 Followers – If you’re a movie star or famous music artist you can get away with this because your fans don’t expect you to acknowledge them anyway.
300,000 Following, 300,000 Followers – You are following back as many as follow you. If you’re not careful and auto follow back people, you might be following a lot of spam bots. But if I was to follow you, it would appear that you would reciprocate. You are displaying a willingness to be social and acknowledge my presence.
2,000 Following, 10 Followers – You’re obviously just trying to spam people on Twitter and only 10 people have found value in what you have to say.
If you really want to build up a relevant following, you have to follow people back. I am not advocating the auto following back of automated bots, but your following versus followers ratio says a lot about what your intentions are for using Twitter. Think about it and start following back real people who can potentially become brand advocates or even customers for you. Social media has leveled the playing field between businesses and consumers, and consumers feel empowered. Why you wouldn’t want to follow them back and acknowledge their presence is beyond me.
3) Tweet Strategically
Does your company even have a Twitter content strategy? Is your Community Manager deciding what content to share, and not your Content Marketing Czar? If you are confused by any of these questions or terms, your business probably isn’t tweeting strategically, and I find this is one of the most common mistakes your business is probably guilty of. Think about it: Twitter isn’t about you, it’s about them. What information and communication do they want to hear? Start tweeting it!
Twitter is not just about sharing information but also about communication, which has been displayed all too clearly in the recent political upheavals in Africa and the Middle East. Is your business truly being social and engaging with the public? One easy way of accomplishing this is to simply create a Twitter List of the people you want to engage with. You are allowed to create 20 lists, each with 500 members. You can create them for a variety of reasons, but I guarantee you that for every 500 people you put on a list, there will definitely be a few who thank you for list inclusion, assuming that you named the list in a way that would make them feel proud to be on. Once they are on your list, you have the additional benefit of being able to easily monitor their conversations and look for a chance to engage with them based on content that might not be picked up by your savvy social media monitoring software.
5) Create an Industry Chat
If you haven’t noticed the growth in Twitter chats, where have you been? Chats give you the ability to network with real people, many of whom are joining the conversation to learn about any given topic. I believe a Twitter chat can be an extension of your content strategy. In other words, if you are trying to be resourceful and share information about your industry, why don’t you take the extra step and create an industry chat to engage with other users while you share the information? Just one more way to attain thought leadership, grow your following, engage with social media users, and spread the word about your company. What’s stopping you from starting one?
