3 Twitter Rules to Live By
So As Not to Annoy Your Twitter Followers
By now you know that social media is an important force in consumer’s lives. If you didn’t know that you’ve either been living under a rock, or missed the fact that Facebook recently surpassed Google in Web traffic for a one week period in mid-March.
Social media is here to stay. Is your company prepared to enter into or maintain a presence in the social media realm?
Sure, someone in the company might have signed you up for Twitter. You might even have your own profile on LinkedIn or heard that FourSquare is supposed to be the next big thing.
But do you really know how to utilize these to the best of your abilities? Or are you just randomly tweeting shortened links?
Shoeless Joe Jackson once told Ray Kinsella, “If you build it, he will come.” The same can be said outside of Field of Dreams as well, “If you tweet it, they will come.”
Twitter is a great way to promulgate your company’s ideas, insights and information.
Pointing followers to good content is key. If you give them something to look forward to your tweets won’t be invasive or annoying. They’ll start to look to you as a thought leader and trust that you actually know what you’re talking about.
Unfortunately, some companies get so caught up in tweeting outstanding content they forget the first thing you should do on Twitter – establish that followers can trust you.
To protect the guilty I’m not going to name names here. I’d rather not burn a bridge if I don’t have to and the company has recently begun to clean up their act. For the sake of coherence and decreasing my use of pronouns here, I’ll call this tweeter Mary.
Mary was a trailblazer in her organization. She recognized the fact that Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with current customers and get potential customers interested in what her company offers so she created a company account in October.
Mary was a bit unsure of how to engage her audience on Twitter so for a couple of weeks she wasn’t very active. And then, her organization decided they wanted to tweet press releases, case studies and fun things going on at headquarters.
Mary took that information and ran with it. For about three months she regularly tweeted links to online content.
The only problem is that the links were the only thing she was tweeting – and they were shortened links.
She never posted any identifying information about who the link was from or where it would lead someone who clicked on it. Apparently, Mary thought that just because SHE was the one who tweeted it everyone would want to click on that link. For all any of her followers knew, Mary’s Twitter account had been hacked and was tweeting viruses.
Rule # 1 of Twitter – Shortened links can be scary. Explain what they are or where they lead people.
Mary forgot another important rule of Twitter here – no matter what medium you’re using to draw customers to your company, you have to hook them with something they want or need.
I never clicked on any of Mary’s links because she never told me why that specific link would interest me. I’m sure there is a lot of information I missed about the organization because I didn’t click the links, but she never gave me a reason to do so.
Rule # 2 of Twitter – When you’re explaining where your shortened links lead, make sure you do so in a compelling way. You have about 120 characters (after you post a shortened link) to grab attention so you have to be clear and very concise as you write what is essentially your link’s headline.
As I said earlier, Mary keeps getting better. She hasn’t tweeted a random link since March 2 (though she’s relapsed before) so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that she’s getting onto the straight and narrow.
I’d be completely happy to be her Twitter follower if she does, but she’s still breaking one more rule that is keeping her on the verge of being “unfollowed.”
Rule # 3 – I don’t care how important you think the information you’re tweeting is; please don’t tweet it more than twice in a row over an extended period of time.
Mary broke this rule last week. She was posting event pictures to her organization’s Facebook page. To let her Twitter followers know there were new pictures available, she tweeted “Spring time at Mary’s company.” And she tweeted it. And tweeted it. And tweeted it. And tweeted it. And just to be safe, she tweeted it one more time all within a half hour.
I’m sorry Mary, but I don’t really care about Spring time at your company that much. It was cute when I saw the link the first time, but after the third announcement I was trying my hardest to ignore you and by the sixth tweet my mouse hovered dangerously close to the “Unfollow” button.
Maybe she’ll slowly pick up on Rule # 3 and save face soon.
Luckily for Mary, I’m actually interested in what her company has to say. If I didn’t have an acute interest in the organization she would have been gone in a heartbeat.
Remember to ask yourself. Do you know what you’re doing on Twitter or are you like Mary and need a bit of guidance?
Following my top three rules is not a fool-proof way to not annoy your Twitter followers, but it’ll help in the long run.
Liz Harter has a degree in English Writing with a minor in Spanish from Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Ind. She is an award winning journalist on the collegiate level with a strong background in journalism. She currently works in PR and is a social media autodidact Google+
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