Twitter is a social platform based on 140 characters being allowed per message sent. You’d think it would be easy and that you could do no wrong with that simplicity. The reality, however, is quite different.
Brands have made many mistakes
on Twitter. Some are more obvious, like the time the @Chryslerautos account dropped an f-bomb. Others are a bit more
subtle, and that’s what I’ll be looking at in this article.
1. Taking up all the space for
retweets
See what I was saying about
subtle? Yes, you have 140 characters to tweet, but that doesn’t mean you have
to fill each and every character with every tweet. If you want retweets to
happen you need to leave space for the “RT @username:” to appear.
Failing to do so will quickly lead to fewer retweets as people will rarely take the time to edit your tweet. Try to keep your tweets to no more than 120 characters.
The biggest strength of
Twitter, and any social media platform, is its ability to make content go
viral. If it isn’t spread easily, it won’t go viral or even get shared at all.
2. Having a long Twitter handle
Long Twitter handles take up
space that could be used for the rest of the message. If someone wants to tweet
at you, but your handle takes up too many characters, they may just not bother
tweeting you at all.
Take the @MTN_Dew account as an
example. They could have gone with @Mountain_Dew, but those extra 5 characters
can make a difference in how easily people tweet to you. Their account is all
about frequent tweeting and hyper-engagement. I short Twitter handle makes that
possible. You probably don’t have to go as extreme as the legend known as @A
though:
I don’t trust this inflight map. Somehow we gained 11 feet while parked at the gate.
— Andrei Zmievski (@a) September 24, 2014
Ok, maybe the handle is
legendary, not the tweets.
3. Abusing hashtags
We all know about not using any
more than three hashtags in a single tweet as engagement drops off at that
point. What I’m talking about here is not using them properly in that you don’t
take the time to consider what the hashtag is about.
Take DiGiorno’s Pizza for an
example. They tweeted “You had pizza” for the
#whyistayed hashtag. This hashtag was about domestic violence. I’m willing to
bet that they saw the hashtag trending, copied it into a tweet, and sent out
the tweet without a second thought.
If ever there was a lesson in not abusing every single trending topic that comes along, this was certainly one. Research your hashtags, people!
@MissTanya It was a horrible and careless mistake. I take full responsibility and hope people realize I would never do this on purpose.
— DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) September 9, 2014
4. Treating social media like a magazine
What’s the first word in social
media? Social. If you’re just blankly turning out tweets and never responding
when people get @ you, why are you bothering with Twitter? Social media is
social, and you need to be social too.
The best thing that you can do
for your brand on Twitter is create real relationships with people. That is
done one to one. With better relationships established, people are more apt to
spread not only your tweets, but your brand message.
To give you a real example from
my experience, I was working to get the attention of an influencer on Twitter that
I knew from working with before on his blog. To get his attention I:
●
Retweeted his
content with comments and never heard back.
●
Tweeted at him
directly and never heard back.
●
Included him in
a conversation with other influencers and he was the only one not to get back.
With all those times he ignored me I decided to ignore him. It seemed as if he was only interested endlessly tweeting out content in Hootsuite and walking away. That’s BORING.
5. Promoting themselves too much
No one likes a braggart. The
account I was mentioning above does nothing but tweet out its own content over
and over. Not only is it boring, it’s never going to help you grow your
audience. Think of sharing content as a way to let other people know that you
appreciation them. This can help you get retweets from Twitter accounts with
high influence, and offer your audience a fresh perspective.
A general rule to follow is tweeting around 1/4 of your own content, and 3/4 of other people’s content. Make it fun, make it shareable, and you’ll see your follower numbers grow quickly. See how the Devumi Gorilla tweeted someone else’s content and got a retweet and a mention:
@devumi thanks for sharing my post! :) how's your week going?
— Stuart Davidson (@RealSocialShark) January 7, 2015
6. Only tweeting from 9am-5pm EST
It is a big, wide world out
there with people living in many time zones. Some of the biggest brands combat
this by setting up Twitter accounts for separate time zones. For instance,
Chevrolet have their @Chevrolet account for people in the USA. They also have
@Chevroletbrasil, @ChevroletArabia, @ChevroletEurope, @ChevroletSA,
@Chevrolet_RUS, and many others to accommodate people in all time zones.
You may not have the capital to
set up all of these accounts, but you can use a free social dashboard tool like
Hootsuite to schedule tweets for those times. Just don’t set it and forget it,
you have to engage with your fans afar the next day!
7. Having waaaay too much to
say all at once
Brands that practice tweet
flooding (a term I coined last year that has not caught on) send out a mass of
tweets all at once. This clogs up a user’s Timeline and is a real annoyance.
Unless you’re live tweeting from a very relevant event, you’re going to want to
send no more than 2-3 tweets out per hour.
Now that we've pointed out some flawed Twitter practices, I'll tell you, being a smart brand on Twitter means following one basic rule: Would you do
this in real life?
Every time you consider sending
out a message you’re not sure about, think about what you’d do in real life.
Looking at the examples above in order:
1. Would you have so much to say in one conversation that you didn’t allow space for others to share your message?
2.
Would you force
other people to say your first, middle and last name in every conversation?
3.
Would you jump
into the middle of someone else’s conversation without knowing what it’s about?
4.
Would you ignore
every single person who tries to talk to you?
5.
Would you only
ever talk about yourself and not anyone else?
6.
Would you only
talk to people from set hours and not engage with people from other countries?
7.
Would you have
so much to say that you drowned out everyone else’s conversation?
If you answered yes to any of these, you either weren’t raised properly or you’re a sociopath. Be a smart brand on Twitter, and adjust your Twitter marketing approach to get in line with these guidelines.
Excellent post Matthew! I really like the light-hearted tone and some really interesting and useful nuggets of information. I am heading over to my Twitter now and implement a few changes. Thank you for sharing! http://www.intouchcrm.com/
Thank you for this post, I am also addicted to twitter for sharing so that is why sometimes my account got temporary disable but thank for sharing this information now I know what do.