Businesses love using Twitter as part of their social marketing campaign. Short messages are far easier to compose than longer messages on Facebook. Creating a profile is easier than creating a page. However, these four mistakes could cost you your entire Twitter following. Check your tweets and ensure you’re not making these deadly mistakes.
Never Automate
You may be busy, but your followers should never see you as too busy to compose a 140 character tweet. While it may be appealing to automate your tweets to show your latest blog and Facebook posts, your followers don’t appreciate it. A stream of endless links turns off followers quickly. Create personal tweets, even when you post links, to show followers their time is important to you.
Quit Repeating
Even with a major promotion or contest, you should never post the same message (in any form) more than three times a day. Any more and you sound like a broken record. Your followers follow you because they are interested in learning more, not reading the same message repeatedly. When you tweet, make it new.
The only time you can truly get away with repeat messages is during a countdown. For instance, a movie studio may post a tweet each hour to build hype over a movie release.
Relationships Before Money
Introduce yourself before you introduce your product. This applies not only to the tweets themselves, but to messages and conversations as well. Your followers want to build relationships with businesses. They will be happy to buy from you if your relationship is about more than money. When you tweet, create a balance between relationship building tweets and promotional ones. Your fans will love it.
Don’t Create Spam
While this should be an obvious one, don’t spam your followers. Only create tweets which are relevant to your audience. Many companies make the mistake of trying to gain more followers by asking their current followers to share links in order to enter a contest. Your followers may not mind, but their followers do. Essentially, their followers feel as if they are being spammed. Your followers should only share links by choice, not as a requirement.
These four mistakes can kill even the best laid Twitter plans. Stop them today for better success tomorrow.