It's Open - Social Media Strategy Consultancy

New Twitter users, and even regular Twitter users, can often make a number of mistakes that result in a loss of followers and a bad online reputation. Here’s the top 10 mistakes to avoid.

• Broadcasting without interacting: If your news feed only contains links to your site, without a single interaction with other Twitter users, what would be the benefit in following you? Twitter is for conversation not broadcasting.
• Not following others: By not following anyone else, you’re giving the impression that you have no interest in what anyone else is talking about.
• Following hundreds, but only having a small number of followers yourself: If you’re following 100 people, and only 3 are following you back, it can look spammy.
• Failing to use a URL shortener: URL shortening systems have a number of benefits, including tracking and affiliate advantages. It also stops you filling an entire tweet with one link. Choose from a variety of URL shortening services.
• Having a long username: When you’re thinking about creating your account, consider the length of your username. A long username will limit how long other people’s tweets to you can be, and how easily others can retweet you.
• Not leaving space for a retweet: Similar to the above, if your tweet uses all 140 characters and others want to retweet you, they’ll have to remove some of the content. Make it easier for them and you’ll get more retweets!
• Comping: A popular Twitter trend is to enter competitions through retweeting. Great for winning prizes, but you’re unlikely to garner many followers.
• Not tweeting enough: Twitter is a fast moving community, so one tweet a month will get lost in the noise and will struggle to engage followers.
• Tweeting far too much!: Constant tweeting, particularly about controversial subjects, is likely to irritate followers.
• Automatic DM: Automatic Direct Messages are a huge bugbear for many Twitter users.ReadyDesignswrote a good post on it recently outlining the three main reasons why automatic DMs are bad.

What puts you off following someone on Twitter?

Related articles

• Subtle but Very Important Twitter Tips and Techniques You Should Know (cause no one will tell you) (hanselman.com)
• Survey: 71 percent of tweets are ignored (cnn.com)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 11:00 am and is filed under Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.