Worst Twitter Practices: Avoid These Bad Habits

Kamaron Institute PI Positive Impact Blog Margaret Ross
Margaret Ross, Editor

Avoid These Six Bad Habits or Risk Losing Customers In Droves

Businesses everywhere are discovering that Twitter is a wonderful way to find new customers, keep in touch with existing customers, keep an eye on the competition, network with others in your field, and find out what your customers are saying about them.

However, Twitter is also a very public forum, so if you make mistakes on Twitter you can risk hurting your good name forever.kamaron pi positive impact avoid social media bad habits

Here are six Twitter habits which drive people on Twitter absolutely crazy:

1.Using Twitter Direct Messages as an attempt to sell products - either yours or someone else's. Everyone's inboxes are filling up with too many DMs these days, and when you force people to wade through direct message inbox clutter, it annoys them. It's like getting spam in their inbox. Yes, they did choose to follow you, which means they can choose to unfollow you, too.

2. Tricking people into clicking on a link that leads to a sales page. Example: "Here's how I finally house trained my puppy!" with a link...and the link leads to a sales page for an ebook on dog training. As the saying goes, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." People will very likely unfollow you if you do this.

3. Mention spam. A mention (@ sign with a twitter name) is meant to be a kind thing to do. Its purpose is to call attention to a useful article, interesting reference or to express thanks. It's rewarding to see "Thanks for the help @your-twittername." It means you have helped and connected. Mention spam is the evil twin

This is creating a tweet with copy bait to appear in the Twitter stream of people who are not following you. Example: I saw this earlier today "Video Proof: $636,217.33 Account, no joke." The person included a link to their self promotion and include my twitter name plus 4 others. I wasn't following this person. This behavior is bad for your business.

Tweet deck has a useful tool to quickly identify mention spammers, block mention spammers and report them as spam.

4. Tweeting nothing but links back to your home page. That's the Twitter equivalent of being the person at the party who only speaks about themselves.

Even if your home page is filled with fascinating, useful, articles, you should be sure to share the spotlight. And when you praise other people, it shows you off in a good light. So make sure that in between those self-promotional tweets, you also sincerely recommend and commend other people's ideas, services and products. Just get on out there and interact.

Talk to people. Ask questions, answer questions, tell a little something about your day. It makes people feel as if they know you, and people like to do business with people that they know.

5. Bad mouthing people in your field. Word gets around quickly. Be positive, say nice things about nice people, say nothing about less- than-nice people in your field.

6. Tweeting too much - as in blasting out a whole series of Tweets all at the same time, which fills up the Twitter home page of your followers and makes people see you as long-winded and self-centered.

At least allow a few minutes in between each tweet, so that other people can get a word in edgewise. Twitter is all about the give and take.

   

Contact: Margaret Ross is President and CEO of the Kamaron Institute, a leading business management consulting, marketing research, and staff development firm.

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