Twitter has great potential for social media marketing. It allows you to communicate information in bite-sized chunks that your followers can access wherever they are. It can be used to build anticipation, engage potential customers and more. But like any tool, if it’s used incorrectly, it can not only fail to help you, it can actually cause more harm than good. Here are some of the mistakes people make when promoting their brands on Twitter and how you can avoid them.
- Not tweeting enough. Twitter may provide bite-sized content, but it provides it in bulk. Your followers also follow hundreds of other people, each tweeting steadily over the course of the day. How will anyone ever see your one update amid that chaos? Your Twitter posts need to be regular and frequent—more so even than Facebook or your blog. The more you post, the better your visibility is. If you aren’t posting regularly, people will quickly forget about your brand.
- Over-promoting. Twitter is a great promotional tool, but it’s not your personal advertising space. You can’t only post links to your products or reviews of your latest endeavor. Sure, it’s an opportunity to keep people updated about your brand, but first you have to post things that will make people want to follow you. Twitter is a form of miniature content. So just like your blogs should be more than essays on why your brand is amazing and your videos should be more than commercials for your product, your tweets need to have substance in order to be worthwhile. Below are a couple of ways people over-promote.
- Auto-tweets. Auto-tweets were actually designed for marketers. The concept is sound in theory. By composing tweets in advance and scheduling them to be posted later automatically, you can increase your visibility, creating a regular schedule of content that reaches your followers on all different time tables, from early birds to insomniacs, without your having to make manual posts 24/7. However, the tool has been misused and abused, and now Twitter is virtually unanimous in its distaste for anything auto-tweeted. The problem is that they’re used to flood users’ timelines all day long with identical, impersonal “form letter” tweets. They read like advertisements and as such get tuned out and ignored. Create relevant tweets and post them by hand. If you post anything that even looks like an auto-tweet, you’ll only end up losing followers.
- Too many retweets. Retweets are a delicate balance. On the one hand, retweeting important posts from other brands is a good way to connect with them and get them to retweet YOUR important posts. And if someone you follow posts something interesting or insightful, sharing it can be fun for both you and your followers. But some brands retweet anything and everything. They’ll retweet hundreds of posts that have little significance—even other people’s auto-tweets—in the hope that those people will retweet them in return. Keep in mind, your followers followed YOU. Your insights are the ones they want. If all you do is flood their timelines with meaningless posts from other people, they’ll filter out all your retweets or unfollow you altogether.
Not engaging your followers. Keeping your finger on the pulse of your potential customers is vital for brand promotion. And Twitter makes it easy. You can talk to them directly, find out what they’re looking for, answer their questions and establish connections that ultimately lead to sales. The biggest mistake you can make on Twitter is to make it all about you. When in reality, it’s all about your followers.
