Here are some random things I have learned about Twitter in the last 2 years, in no real intelligent order – completely random and off the top of my head as I sit in my hotel room in Las Vegas, gearing up for the Clio Awards.
I use Twitter for business and personal and it works for me. I am careful not to bombard those who follow me with too many marketing messages. I realize the business value of Twitter so I frequently tweet about Intel. I track my retweets and click throughs to Intel-related content and it’s relatively high; more so than search or display advertising. Volume is low but that’s fine; it’s about building trustworthy relationships.
I wrote a twitter manifesto about a year ago and I don’t necessarily think the same way I did back then; although I still follow the 80/20 rule. 80% of my tweets are conversational, personal or general industry related. The 20% is Intel specific.
I look at every new profile that follows me and I don’t always reciprocate. I usually won’t follow back if their profile is filled with one way bit.ly marketing messages; they have no bio or picture; they are in multi level marketing; they are a self proclaimed social media expert; they are following thousands of people and only have a couple of hundred followers; and of course they have no updates.
I only follow people I think I can learn from. I try and provide some level of value to those who follow me as well.
I try and limit the “I am eating _____ “and “I am wearing ____” tweets.
Once in a while, I check to see who stopped following me and often wonder why. Sometimes I unfollow back out of spite, sometimes I don’t.
Twitter is full of egos and I am cool with that. Frequent retweets of my content often stroke my ego too. I don’t brag about the number of followers I have nor do I ask for people to follow me, except here on my own domain.
I get irritated when people RT a RT that was their original tweet. It doesn’t make sense to me and it feels somewhat spammy. It also bugs me when people tweet the same message twice … could be grounds for unfollowing peeps; even though I may have done this once or twice in my past life.
It used to bother me when certain people follow me; and after I reciprocate, they unfollow me for the sole purpose of inflating their follower ratio. If I come across this, I usually just unfollow.
The birth of twitter has somehow created a multitude of social media experts who have been working in social media for 10 years or more. I wrote about this in a rant here and still feel the same.
And yes, brands do belong on twitter; but need to be human when doing so.
And since I am here on my own domain, I will humbly ask that if I offer any value whatsoever, consider subscribing to my feed or following me on twitter.
About Michael Brito