You all knew this day would come. I’ve talked about Facebook, I’ve talked about Google+, and I’ve mentioned blogging more than a few times. But what about Twitter, the social media platform that literally causes marketing professionals to lose control of their saliva production?
What is Twitter good for?
- fast and brief conversation; anything in depth doesn’t fit in 140 characters
- feeling like part of a community/building community
- being able to respond, quickly and briefly, to fans/readers/customers/etc.
- access to people who are well-known in their fields and have a large(ish) fan base, aka networking
- small amounts of self-promotion (the key word being SMALL) about your latest book, blog post, upcoming appearance, or what-have-you
- finding out if it was just you or was that really just an earthquake
However, I have noticed certain habits of Twitter users that can be, to state it bluntly, irritating or even off-putting. Here are my top three:
1. Huge volume. Last week someone I follow on Twitter must have posted twenty or thirty different “truism” tweets within fifteen minutes, completely flooding my timeline for that entire period. Another person has tweeted twelve random links (not RTs, mind you) in the past hour; and this isn’t rare or unusual behavior for him. At a certain point, volume no longer provides value for your followers, but instead merely feels like spam.
2. Automated Direct Message Upon Following. I can only assume people do this because they have failed to comprehend how slimy and inauthentic it feels to be on its receiving end. If you want to automate your Twitter account to follow everyone back and happily give numbers to spammers, well, at least it doesn’t affect me directly. But sending me a spam message because I was interested enough to follow you has the effect of giving a poor first impression. Happily others agree with me.
3. Large amount of repetition/over-promotion. Twitter is a fleeting platform, so I understand the need to share an important piece of information (my book is out! I have an awesome new blog post! my story is out!) more than once so that your followers don’t miss it. Share it more than twice in twenty-four hours, though, and my patience wears thin–plus it had better be really important to you. Tweet about the same blog post every couple of days, while possibly disguising that it is the same blog post, and I will never again click on any links you share. I made the mistake of following one well-known personality who not only has a volume problem, but has scheduled all of his tweets to be shared four times a day. Yes, that’s FOUR times. For ALL his tweets, most of which are random links that I can’t imagine he’s super invested in. Again, this feels like spam, and perhaps more importantly, it makes this person appear to be inauthentic. And being inauthentic on Twitter is the kiss of death.
People don’t like to be marketed to, they like to be connected with. Social media is all about achieving marketing through connection, which will hopefully make the experience more palatable for everyone. Commit regular acts of spam and no one wins.
Disagree with any of my pet peeves? Have any of your own to add? Let me know!
The Practical Free Spirit 
I hate the auto-reply emails. Hate, hate, hate.
You know what makes me sad? I didn’t realize at first that they *were* automatic, so I thought, wow, this person is so nice. Then the other shoe dropped. I guess that’s what they’re counting on, though…
I agree with you on most points, but my thinking on repetition has changed as the number of people I’m following grew. Even though I use lists, there’s no way to see every post someone makes — too many things get lost in the noise. And if you consider the variable of time zones, how does my post in Central time manage to reach everyone from the Eastern Seaboard to the West Coast? I’m with you on multiple posts and RTs one right after the other, but I’m thinking that spreading out several posts about your new book or blog post throughout the course of the day might be the only way to reach people.
It’s a tough issue, isn’t it? From a marketing perspective, it’s ideal to repeat the same information a bunch of times, both because the Twitter stream scrolls by so quickly and because of the old adage about repetition being key to getting someone interested.
And yet, if a blog post, for example, gets tweeted many times with different headlines for variety’s sake, and I click on it twice, then I feel like I’ve been fooled. I don’t really mind the same tweet twice in a day, and I suppose I wouldn’t notice a repetition in the middle of the night. I guess it’s just a fine line between getting the message out there and not driving away your potential audience. And I suppose the problem is exacerbated by a high volume.
I’ve started to get automated (or at least copy and pasted) @ replies once I follow someone. It seems really dumb because all you have to do is look at the person’s account to see identical greetings… but these things must be at least a little effective if people do them, right?
Really? Another one to add to the pet peeve list, I guess. And yeah, that isn’t a particularly clever way to go about spamming someone.
Maybe these tactics are effective on new users? Or maybe some users are just too busy to check and so assume the best? It’s very mysterious.
I want to be supportive of writers, but recently got caught up in a couple of marketing campaigns for other people’s new books. I didn’t know how to say no, and agreed to tweet supportive marketing messages. If we all make that same mistake, Twitter will just be a stream of ads. Which it sometimes seems like already.
Oh no! I agree that saying no can be tricky, but ideally you’d only be tweeting about books that you’re really excited about (either because you can’t wait to read them or because you just did read them and they were amazing).
I try to avoid the Twitter users that make my stream seem like all ads and promotion, all the time. It can be difficult though.