Five Twitter Mistakes You Must Avoid

Since Twitter went maintream, companies have been trying to implement a Twitter strategy capable of producing a return on their investment.  Being an avid Twitter user since 2008, I have seen an astronomical amount of tweet spam and endless attempts at promoting a product or service, ignoring the fact that social media is about relationship building and creating value for your customers. Depending on your content, you either sink or swim in the Twittersphere. Here’s five tips to help you stay afloat.

Do not follow everyone.

It’s understandable that you have to start following people to get a follow in return, but attempting to follow everyone you possibly can tarnishes your Twitter reputation.  Twitter has begun to automatically shut down accounts that mass follow people.  If you are a small business with one location in Indiana, it makes no sense to follow people in Florida. Applications such as TwitterLocal and Twellow are great places to begin looking for your target audience.  Search for people tweeting about products or services similar to yours and follow them.  Since they already have an interest in your what you have to offer, the more inclined they will be to chat with you.

Never repeat the same tweet.

A quick way to lose followers is repeatedly tweeting the same thing.  If you have two or three tweets that your followers can memorize, you have a problem on your hands.  Providing the same information day after day gets boring after a while.  If your favorite TV show aired the same episode each week, you would find a new show to watch.  Same thing happens on Twitter. People want fresh, entertaining and informative content, and they count on your to give that to them.

Constant self promotion.

The most overlooked tweets are the ones filled with self promotion.  Including your website link and a short bio in your Twitter profile is all the self promotion you need.  Creative and compelling content makes people visit your profile to find out more about you.  Linking to your blog posts and other news relevant to your industry is acceptable because people with similar interests want to stay informed on industry issues.  Constant self promotion is one way communication and holds no value to your network.

Keeping stale followers.

In order to keep a fresh network, you have to perform routine maintenance on your Twitter.  People create profiles all the time, send three tweets and never tweet again.  You want to maintain an active network.  Applications such as Tweepi allow you to see who follows you and how active they are on Twitter.  Tweepi also allows you to see what percentage of your followers just post links and how often they retweet.  Performing maintenance on your Twitter network weekly ensures you will get the most out of your network.

Creating an account and forgetting about it.

If you have decided to start a social media strategy, make sure you have the time to maintain it.  People will easily forget about you if you don’t tweet on a regular basis.  Just like you want an active network, others do too.  With the number of applications that allow you to schedule tweets up to a month in advance, you should not have a problem keeping your account updated.  Schedule your tweets and keep an eye on your replies and direct messages.  It’s better to respond to someone later than not tweeting at all.

As the use of Twitter increases among consumers and businesses, avoiding these five mistakes can attribute to the success of your Twitter strategy.  Losing a follower is similar to losing a customer.  Please tweet responsibly.