Twitter is an amazing platform for the social media marketer for many, many reasons. Firstly, its brevity. Those 140 characters make tweets the perfect size for scrolling and browsing in today’s busy business world. Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn to a certain extent can of course also be useful for staying up to date on what’s happening and what’s trending in the world of social media, but when you’re pressed for time on your coffee break, you can’t beat Twitter.
Secondly, the communities that you build can be of outstanding resource. As a content marketer, I make it my business to follow all the other content marketing obsessives that are out there, paying particular attention to the key influencers in the niche (see ‘The 3 Giants of Social Media And Their Most Important Teachings’), and building connections wherever I go.
Which brings me onto the third great thing about Twitter – networking. The more you have to say on Twitter, the more people have to say in response to it. Every now and again a really interesting conversation can begin, and before you know it you start building a relationship with a fellow professional whom you have never met, but one that can often last for years.
Fourthly, there are some outstanding articles that are put up as link posts on Twitter in a practically constant stream (and I should know, I make a significant contribution to that stream myself). If you’re following the right people, then you can set the little blue bird in flight at any point during the day and your news feed will instantly be filled with some of the best web writing that the internet has to offer. Blogs, videos, how-to demonstrations, tips, tutorials, breaking news – it’s all there for me every day when I sign in to my account.
Getting The Most Out Of Twitter
I’ve been in the content marketing game for a while now, so I’ve become pretty au fait with how the platform works (I write about it a lot, too, as the wilier amongst you will have noticed). I use Twitter both as a resource for networking and information, and also from a professional standpoint, where I market my own business, as well as the blogs that I write for other people’s businesses.
I don’t mind telling you that in order to become the quick-tweeting pro that I am now, I’ve made a lot of errors along the way. That is to say that I haven’t always been as praiseful of the platform as I am now – I used to find it tedious, quite frankly. But that was just because I wasn’t using it properly.
I’m happy to say, though, that now I have overcome any annoyance that I might have once felt with Twitter, and I have also managed to get to grips with the functions, features and etiquette of the network as well in order to get the very best out of it.
In fact, my attitude has undergone a complete turnaround, and Twitter is now actually my favourite social media platform of the lot of them – and I have a working strategy in place that sees Twitter bring more new clients to my door than all of my other channels combined.
I want you to have a sterling Twitter strategy that works for you like this as well, but unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules that can be set up to work right across the board for any given business. However, there are some very common mistakes that people make (I know – I’ve made most of them myself at one point or another), and I list to you here the top 3 to avoid at all costs if you want to get the most out of your Twitter marketing campaign.
Mistake #1 – Automating Direct Messages
Automation is a great thing for scheduling tweets on Twitter – and absolutely nothing else. The ability to be able to line up a month’s worth of tweets (or even 6 months) in just a few minutes and schedule them to be posted intermittently over that period can be a real lifesaver for the social media marketer. Every time you publish a new blog, you just head over to Hootsuite, Buffer, or whatever your favourite scheduling tool happens to be, and set it to tweet 3 times a week for the next 4 weeks – job done.
However, some people – in fact a lot of people – have started automating their direct messages. What they do is set up a direct message to be sent out to their new followers. Usually they say something like: “Thanks for the follow, be sure to check out my website/Facebook/Google+/Instagram page too!”
Needless to say there is nothing remotely personal about this sort of message. In fact, the whole “social” side of social networking has vanished completely with these. I expect you’re like me – if you can see that someone has gone to the trouble of writing out a personalised direct message thanking me for the follow, I engage with it. Otherwise I just ignore them completely – and I certainly never, ever, ever check out their website, Facebook or anything else.
Don’t do this. Instead write out a personal reply for every follow that you get – don’t try and automate everything, for it is essentially no better than spamming.
Mistake #2 – Buying Followers
We’ve all seen those tweets – “10,000 followers instantly for just $5!! Buy now!!” Let’s get one thing straight – 10,000, 20,000, or 1 million followers doesn’t impress anyone, and if all the followers that you have are paid for and fake, then there’s no one out there to impress anyway.
The purpose of Twitter is not to show off to the world how popular you are (or pretend you are), but to build up an enthralled and engaged community of genuine leads who you hope to convert into paying customers.
Fake followers don’t have any money to spend, nor any means of typing out tweets to engage with your account. Your real followers will notice very quickly what you’ve done, and when they do, you will forgive them for unfollowing you en masse without hesitation – for obviously all you’re interested in is the number after your name, and not building genuine relationships on Twitter.
Mistake #3 – Being An Egg
There are so many small individual businesses out there who are still using the default ‘egg’ symbol in lieu of uploading a real photograph of themselves or image of their brand’s logo. Twitter is a social network, which means you have to give your profile some personality – and the default ‘egg’ doesn’t do this.
You need to show that you are engaged with the platform – and eggs, frankly, just give the impression that you are lackadaisical at best about “this whole Twitter nonsense”, let alone a bit of a technology dinosaur. Put simply, it gives a very bad first impression of your brand, and I for one never follow or engage with an ‘egg’, and you shouldn’t either – so don’t be one.
What has your Twitter experience been like? Do you use it in your social media marketing strategy? Share with us in the comments below!
Don’t Make These Top 3 Twitter Mistakes! is a post from: GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips
The post Don’t Make These Top 3 Twitter Mistakes! appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips.
No comments:
Post a Comment