Tweet Well (Part 1)
I have a love-hate relationship with Twitter.
I’m logged into it all day for ELISE, and find it to be a fantastic resource. I’ve connected with other PR pros, found out who’s talking about our clients and reached out to journalists we couldn’t track down through more conventional means. Even on days when we’re not sending tweets, we all take some time over the course of the day to make sure we’re not missing out on any big news. (How do you think we learned of Michael Jackson’s untimely demise or the earthquake in Haiti?) And services like HootSuite and TweetDeck, both of which I use daily, allow users to filter out some static by monitoring key words in which they’re especially interested.
That’s when I love Twitter. But when I hate it, my animosity sometimes overshadows my love. It’s an animosity that I also feel for advertisers who run uninteresting Super Bowl commercials, bus passengers who talk too loudly on their cell phones and retailers who don’t honor competitors’ coupons: it’s a hatred of not understanding the power and reach of your chosen platform. Think about it:
- Super Bowl advertisers have a captive audience that wants to watch commercials almost as badly as they want to watch the game; if your commercial is boring, it could provide the 30 seconds your television audience needs to go open another beer.
- On the phone on a bus? Small metal spaces tend to make sound project, and now everyone knows about that nasty fungus you picked up at the gym.
- If you’re not honoring your competitors’ discounts, people will just go make that purchase—and the rest of their purchases—at your competitors’ stores, too.
So why would you provide bad information, share too much or ignore other people in your field, in your Twitter feed? These behaviors aren’t just bad practice; they’re downright rude. Not rude in the conventional sense—nasty or insulting—just rude in that they show utter disregard for the power and reach of Twitter as a platform and the engagement of people who use it.
There are approximately 75 million registered Twitter users worldwide. That’s a lot of content to sift through. People who provide good information or entertaining content or relevant news naturally get followers. People who send out pointless or self-promoting tweets, or who tweet out too much, too often, without showing that they’re listening to the conversations happening around (or about) them naturally lose followers. Being polite in your tweets by sharing carefully selected, useful or enjoyable information instead of flooding Twitter with a stream of posts nobody cares about will get you far.
And as to that content nobody cares about? You’ll have to tune in next time for some pointers on best practices for courtesy in the Twitterverse.