Let me preface by saying I don’t think my Twitter account is better than yours. There are some powerful, influential individuals on the micro blogging site who share a lot of great information, and there are some small-scale individuals who tweet some great stuff too.
Over at @realusaseopros, we try to share information about online marketing, SEO, public relations, advertising etc that we find interesting and hope our followers will as well.
Sure, we tweet when we post a new blog, or if there’s a press release done about us – what company doesn’t?
But there’s a line to be drawn with the way some people use Twitter. Step over the line and you risk losing Twitter followers.
We’re thankful for each and every single person/company/bot that chooses to follow us. Every follower is a chance for us to communicate, share ideas and potentially learn from that person.
There are a few caveats though, and they go as follows:
1) I won’t follow you back if you have a terribly written or non-existent biography on your Twitter profile. If you can’t spell “internet”, you’re not going to get my attention.
Similarly, if you don’t have anything written in your bio, I won’t follow you. Trying to guess what you do from a profile picture will get me nowhere and it’s simply not a good branding practice.
Even if you’re simply an at-home marketer trying to make a dollar, write as much. You don’t have to be Guy Kawasaki to be interesting. I look at every single person who starts following the @realusaseopros account. I hover over everyone’s name a read their bio description before deciding (quickly) whether they merit a further look.
2) Along the same line – if you don’t have a profile picture and are simply using the default image, I won’t follow you.
It doesn’t take much to put up an image of you/your company logo/a block of cheese onto Twitter, so do it! It makes you and your Twitter account at least appear more legitimate and legitimacy is what it’s all about!
3) If after I visit your actual profile page I see that you have 3,972 following and 3,899 followers, but only four updates, I’m not going to follow you.
Sorry if that seems harsh, but unless you’re a celebrity or politician, that many followers/following screams spam. I know you can buy entire chunks of people to follow who will auto-follow back, and I’m not interested in helping you pump up your numbers.
If you have interesting things in your Twitter stream, then great! But I’m guessing those four measly updates weren’t so earth-shaking to merit almost 4,000 followers.
4) If you are following me, but what you tweet about isn’t at all related to marketing, SEO, advertising, public relations, branding…then I won’t follow you. It’s nothing personal - I may even like your band’s music! - but we try to keep this account a business one.
5) This last one I’ve written about before, but it fits this article too: having only self-promotion in your Twitter stream.
Maybe you’ve got a great bio description and a good picture, but if when I arrive at your page and every single tweet you have is about your own content, I’m probably not going to follow you.
Of course that’s not the case if you’re CNN, Mashable and others who are centers of information for many of the rest of us. But if you’re a home marketer and you only ever tweet about your own “miracle panacea for online link building”, I won’t follow you back.
Share information that you find interesting across the internet. Let me know how watching your neighbor mowing the lawn gave you an idea about how to market yourself online. It’s your account, and they’re your messages, but if you want to retain audience attention, make it interesting!
We try to use Twitter as a tool to listen, communicate and participate in a large, open community. There are a lot of users on Twitter, and although growth has slowed somewhat on the site, that means there are an ever-growing number of voices to listen to. We appreciate everyone who takes the time to follow our stream and listen to what we have to say. But users who trend to the above list will probably not get our follow.
That being said, we’re always interested in learning from new and interesting people – you!
By: Zack S.
Tags: online branding, online marketing, SEO, twitter followers, Twitter spam, USASEOPros
