How Not To Promote Your Business On Twitter

Don’t Follow Everyone You See

What is up with people and trying to follow everyone they come across, without even having any kind of interest in what they have to say. I think this is a case of Myspace syndrome, because people are assuming they will get followed back just because they followed first. While in fact it just makes you look like a spammer at first glance. There’s nothing more off putting than seeing someone who is following thousands of people but only has a few people following them back. This is mainly because its quite clear that they don’t really care about anything anyone has got to say, as following thousands of people makes it impossible to read what people have to say. Would you follow strangers you have no interest in, out on the street?

Don’t Tweet Too Often

Twitter’s social model is in between instant messaging and emailing. So you need to find the perfect and often variable period in between tweets. Tweeting too often can be very annoying especially if you’re not engaging with the community, and just promoting your business. I’d say it’s OK to tweet as much as you want if you’re replying to someone, but continually tweeting not directly too anyone is defiantly not good.

Don’t Tweet Too Infrequently

This is actually one of my problems. I sometimes just completely forget about Twitter. I think everyone should try to make at least one useful tweet per day. When you don’t tweet people will notice, and you will be most likely be un-followed. I know this is contradictory to my previous point but you really do need to find the perfect balance between often and infrequent.

Via RSS

Whatever you do don’t automate your tweets via RSS or any sort of API. This just makes it obvious that you’re not really saying anything , but you have a system in place to make it look like you do. I know a lot of tweeting automation software exists out there, that randomly sends outs tweets based on certain keywords. Just don’t do it. Do you really think that anyone thinks you’re a legit tweeter?