Recently Ginny Sosky wrote a great blog for Hubspot.
She discussed 11 of these gems of conventional wisdom.
(Please scroll to the bottom of this article and click to enjoy her entire post.
It's very informative.
) 11 Twitter Tips and Tricks That Do Not Work They're strategies like Follow, Pause, Unfollow - this supposedly gets you lots of followers without having to follow a bunch of people back.
(That would be dandy if the idea were "He or she who dies with the most Twitter followers wins.
Sosky says that's not the point.
) "Talk about a terrible way to grow your business," she writes.
"Sure, you may end up with lots more followers, but chances are that these people you're scamming into following you aren't exactly the type that'll want to engage with you, click your links, become leads, and maybe even buy from you -- especially once they realized they've been hoodwinked into following you.
Don't set yourself up for failure by playing games like this -- focus on growing your presence organically.
" As I understand it, organic means attracting followers to the humor, common interests and excellent content you share.
The Mistake That I Made I myself made this mistake on one of our company accounts when I was starting out, albeit unintentionally.
I was following local businesses and businesses in our industry so that they would follow us back.
Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but Twitter does have follower limits.
So when I'd hit those follower limits, I'd use an Unfollow service to flush out all the accounts which hadn't Tweeted in more than 90 days, those which were probably spammers, and those which hadn't followed me back.
One local business called me on it in a Tweet, asking what was up with the Follow/Unfollow/Follow/Unfollow? Boy, was my face red.
I apologized and followed them.
They were silent after that - but I noticed the other day that sometime during the past year they've un-followed us.
So if I had to sum up the 11 bad but common tips for Twitter newbies, I'd say they break what I've come to think of as the Golden Rule of Marketing - Always treat customers as relationships, not transactions.
Hmm.
Relationship Marketing.
Not a bad idea.
I saw on Twitter this morning that 70% of all business comes about because of how consumers feel they're being treated.
With this in mind, all the "good" Twitter tips - like sharing content from others, not Tweeting incessantly about your own products, and being polite and professional make even more sense.
And what about you, Dear Reader? Which brands do you identify with and why? Have you ever gone out of your way to purchase from, or boycott a particular business? Ginny Sosky's blog