Twitter Twists

Twitter Twists

Twitter is all the rage!

Most everyone uses it (nowadays) as a marketing tool.

Nice!

Here are a couple of pet peeves that I see, not a lecture on how to use Twitter to grow ones business. (There’s a ton of material out there for that all ready.)

First off, are you putting yourself in your prospective clients mind? I see a couple of issues here:

1) Way too much babbling on about ones own skills. Yes, we do need to portray a professional image explaining what we do, and demonstrate that we know what we’re doing. What I see occurring though is way too much prattling on about how great “I” am. No one cares. They want a solution for their problem.

2) Too many links. Yes, massage is just wonderful for everything. I doubt we need fourteen thousand tweets with links to some articles (which we didn’t write) stating the benefits of so-and-so and such-and-such. This leads right into the next one, which is…

3) Too much attention placed on what we are doing business-wise. Make it personal; show you are human and have a personality. Tweet about something in regards to YOU! I read somewhere that only about one in ten tweets should be about your business. Again, this leads into the next comment…

4) Way too many friggin’ tweets! This is a personal pet-peeve of mine. If we go on a run with a couple of tweets, cool. If, on a daily basis, we have more than a couple of tweets per hour, especially multiple in a row, that’s just too much. I enjoy reading tweets from many sources. If you and your tweets are hogging up all my space, I (using “I” as your prospective client) need to keep scrolling and scrolling to find other peoples comments. Most everyone’s attention span is very short. No one wants to scroll. If you are taking up people’s time with a ton of material no-one cares about, they are most likely to NOT pay attention to you tweets when you do have something exciting to say! Last and certainly most important here, if you keep it up, folks will un-follow you or block you. Personally, I have four twitter accounts to keep my interests separate. What about your prospective clients though? Are you going to ask them to create another account because you are annoying them?

5) What are you doing with your followers? Have you followed up with a personal direct message thanking them for following you? Do you even know who they are? Are they part of your target market or are they just some new fangled software program that grabs everyone they can so that they can tell their buddies they have 20,000 followers? My buddy did this. He has roughly 18,000 peeps following him on twitter. He is running a business and using twitter for his business. Want to know how many clients he managed to obtain from twitter? None! 0! Nadda! It’s not quantity, its quality.

Now obviously there are exceptions to every rule. If one runs twitter like a forum and has specific advice to dole out, yea, your volume of tweets is going to be pretty big. If twitter is a personal socializing network, cool. Knock yourself out. If it’s a part of your business, run it like a business. Do you strip down nekked and run around your neighborhood screaming to everyone how great you and your business are? I doubt it. Yet, that’s what I see on twitter most of the time.

That’s enough for now off the top of my head. I’ll put the soapbox away ;)

What are your thoughts on this?

Kris