Three and a half years on Twitter, for business, doesn’t sound like a long time, however in the world of social media — it is, believe me!
In today’s post, I am going to practice one of the important lessons I learned on Twitter: Share! Here are 18 things I learned you should not do on Twitter if you want to market yourself (personal branding) or your business.
18 Twitter #Mega-fails
- Do not set up Auto DMs for new followers. It really annoys people.
- Do not “protect your tweets”. What’s the point of using Twitter for marketing if people can’t see your tweets?
- Do not set up a spam filter for your tweets. Most people won’t follow through with the filter.
- Do not schedule your tweets so that multiple tweets suddenly appear in your stream at the same time. You will be labelled a spammer and people will unfollow you.
- Do not automate tweets of your job postings. Pick a select few, customise each one, and spread it out across the week, alongside great content.
- Do not use anything other than a photo of yourself or company logo for your Avatar if you want to be taken seriously (eg. your pet hamster). People prefer to engage with people, so a photo of yourself is recommended, even above a company logo if possible. Put the company logo on your Twitter background instead.
- Unless you’re a food blogger, don’t tweet what you had for breakfast/lunch/dinner. People don’t care and you’re wasting their time.
- Stay away from banal tweets. I read one the other day that said “Went to scratch my nose and poked myself in the eye”. Immediate “unfollow”!
- And whilst I’m at it, don’t tweet about sex or religion unless this is your area of specialisation and that’s what you’re marketing.
- Don’t treat Twitter as a broadcast channel – do more listening and engaging than talking.
- Do not overly promote yourself. Be generous, add value and share a lot. It’s the best kind of promotion you can do.
- Do not use CAPITAL LETTERS – it’s the equivalent of shouting and no-one likes it.
- Do not post your tweet on other social platforms (manually or automatically) unless it is written appropriately for the other platform. E.g. If your tweet contains hashtags or @, remove them for Facebook or LinkedIn. Also remember that the tone of each platform should be different. Best to customise for each one. BTW, keep the hashtags on Pinterest.
- Do not use more than two hashtags in your tweets. Makes your tweets very unappealing to read.
- No-one cares where you checked in, or what you’re the mayor of on FourSquare. Stop polluting feeds with this trivial information.
- Don’t set up an auto-tweet announcing how many people unfollowed you. Not cool. Not cool at all.
- Don’t send a tweet without checking your spelling. Spelling mistakes make you look totally unprofessional.
- Don’t share a link without crediting your source.
Written by Firebrand Marketing Director Carolyn Hyams, originally published on the Firebrand blog (http://blog.firebrandtalent.com/2012/08/twitter-for-business-18-things-you-should-not-do/)
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