ActiveRain Tutorials

This past year I've had the honor of traveling the country as a social media speaker sharing on all types of social media topics like using Facebook for business, how to blog, video basics, and many other topics.  One of the top statements that I've heard this past year while traveling is some variation of this: "Twitter is stupid, I don't get it" which normally leads into a discussion on how Twitter can be used to help your business.

Is Twitter Stupid or A Great Source of Traffic?

One of the things I usually try to point out to people is that Twitter is a great referring source of traffic to your site.  During this past year, it is responsible for 22% of referring traffic.  The only traffic referrer to beat it was Facebook at 33%.  The bounce rates as well as time on site are very similar between the two social networks.  So is Twitter stupid, or a great source of traffic?  I'd have to say the latter.

Twitter Is Stupid, Only Celebrities Are There.

This is another common complaint I hear.  Since you only hear of big name celebrities like Oprah or Justin Bieber on Twitter in the media, many thing that is the only people signing up and using the social network.  Here's a really great visualization of Twitter adoption in the US over the past few years:

As you can see, there are many more signing up for Twitter each & every day.  In fact, over 100 million users are active each month according to Mashable.

Twitter is Stupid I Don't Care What You Ate For Lunch

Why should someone care what you ate for lunch or what you did last night for fun.  I get it, not everyone is going to care about everything you do.  But, if you take some time listening to what others are doing, you can learn a tremendous amount of information about your sphere.  And, build some of the strongest relationships with people.  This past year I made a trip to Seattle to speak and while there some of my Twitter friends a meetup while I was in town.  Thanks to my friends Stephanie, Dale, Linda, & Debra, & Chris, I spent a wonderful evening with a great group of friends, all that I mainly communicate with just through Twitter. So while some may not care about those types of things, I cherish the friendships I have made through Twitter over the past year.  I know more about some of my friends on Twitter from the other side of the country than friends of mine that live within 5 minutes of my home.

So Is Twitter Stupid or Valuable?

I am not going to force you to use Twitter in 2012, but as for my business, I know I will be continue to integrate Twitter into my online marketing strategy.  If you are not sure how to get started there, that is understandable.  Here's a few great resources to get you going in the right direction:

• Get More Followers- Chris Brogan
• 7 Way To Be Hated on Twitter- 210 Consulting
• 50,000 Tweets and All I Got Was Everything- Scott Stratten

If you want to connect with me on Twitter, you can find me @JB140

Today I am sharing part 2 of my series on Social Media Engagement vs. Sales. Last week I shared Six Steps to Converting Guests to Fans of Your Facebook Page. It covered several different issues that I have seen on various Facebook Pages over the past few months. This post is today is going to venture into the world of Twitter. Twitter is another great resource for growing your business online. Nowhere else on the web can you engage people and have so many conversations at once. But what I have found is that many have turned Twitter into their spam grounds. They set up accounts and try to garner as many followers as they can in the quickest means possible. The concept is that if they get thousands of followers they will have a giant net to share their products to and will in essence sell more things. But what I have found is that this is not the case.

When you build a twitter profile where there is no engagement, it results in a very low return on your investment. I am somewhat an open networker. I will accept anyone as a friend and give them a chance to show me they don't belong connected to me anymore. Yesterday I received an auto from a new follower from which I have been able to find 7 things that everyone should NOT do with their twitter account. The following points all came from one single account.

7 Ways to be Hated on Twitter.

1- The auto DM. When I first started on Twitter, I thought it was a good idea to send an Auto message to every new follower with information about me and a link to my site. In the beginning it was actually an effective tool to me as the first followers to my account were friends that I knew. But I learned quickly that spammers and others began to abuse this feature. I quickly disabled it and have since really started to notice the annoyance of users that use those type of services. Over to the right you can see an automated message from the account I recently followed. Their message sent said: "Thanks for following! I HATE SPAM! You won't get that from me. Maybe check out my blog of Twitter tips/tactics for marketers/networkers." My next action was to unfollow and block their account.

2. Creating Good First Impressions- If your first impression is trying to convince me you hate spam and don't do that through a spammed message, you have already lost me. A much more effective way to meet someone on Twitter is to listen to what they are saying and engage with them. Joining into a conversation is really easy to do on Twitter as people are constantly posting things wanting you to interact with them. When you see someone post something that you either have an interest in or a way of adding to the conversation, simply do that.

3. Stop Talking To Yourself! I try to spend more time listening & interacting with others on twitter than I do talking about myself or my business. I don't use a specific formula for this, I just try to keep the conversations more about others instead of me. When everything is all about you and nothing about your friends/followers, they will listen and follow along for a short while, but after a few days of all you and nothing about them they will move on and ignore you.

4. Mentioning Others Make You Human- When I look at your Twitter stream do I see you interacting & talking to others? Or is it littered with you spewing junk all over the place? If all I see is you spitting info without any interaction, it is a pretty quick indicator to me that you are someone that will be spamming my stream and also add zero value to me. Remember, you are coming into my stream of Twitter, it needs to be beneficial to me not you. When your stream shows that you will connect with me and do something valuable to me, I will want to pay attention to you.

5. Share Your Website- This one blew my mind yesterday in the spammers DM to me. He mentions that I should visit his blog for tips to help. But when I visited his profile, there was no link to a site. If you want to be helpful and give me advice, then you need to give me an avenue to travel to it. Just saying visit my blog or website won't cut it if there is no link to it. Your profile on Twitter is a powerful part of your Twitter Account. Adding that link takes only five seconds and helps you to look like less of a spammer.

6. What's Your Ratio? When I look at your profile, do I see you following thousands of people with a lot less following you back? When I see a profile like this, it screams that this is someone just trying to get more followers and isn't very interesting. If you share things that are relevant & engaging, people will want to follow you and you will have many more following you than who you are following. Because of spammers trying to capitalize on this by following more and more people, Twitter installed some guidelines. You can follow up to 2,000 people initially. Then you are only allowed to follow 10% more than those who are following you. So if you have 10,000 followers, you can only follow 11,000 at any time. As your number of followers grow, you can also follow more again.

7. Skip the Selling & Gimmicks- You have minimal characters on your profile to share what it is about. If you are taking that premium ad space to try and promote a gimmick or something you are selling, you will be turning people off. The profile yesterday started out fine by saying that they provide Twitter tips/tactics and Social Media marketing which can be helpful. But after that, they added a gimmick to try and get more exposure and followers by saying "I promote people w/10k+, RT for an add to daily RT list. I follow back!" When I saw this sentence I knew instantly that this person was someone I did not want to interact with anymore. Then, I visited their profile on Twitter.com to see what other junk I may find.

In their background image, they had added the following text:

The timeline and the blog linked above my bio have lots of information about how to turbo-charge Twitter and make money online through Twitter and social media in general. If you retweet my posts about my blog, I'll follow you, add you to my RT list, and give you a solo shoutout with lots of hashtags in it. I also add any users with 10,000+ followers that RT me to my RT list.

These type of gimmicks do nothing but remind me of MLM schemes of days before. Also, I don't believe there is any value that a spammer can add to me by spamming a tweet with my username and "lots of hashtags in it." Engagement is what makes Twitter and other social media platforms successful for your business. A great quote from John Maxwell comes to mind: If you are leading, but nobody is following, then you are just out taking a walk.

So, to keep yourself from becoming a disliked person on Twitter, please ignore the 7 practices listed above. Instead follow the habits of successful people on twitter like @lizstrauss and @chrisbrogan and you will see rewards come your way. I promise!

Originally Posted at: 210 Consulting- Social Media Advisors

photo credit