Mistake #1. Launched and forgot
I met strangers on-line who opened their account many months ago, got some followers, but didn’t post anything. If you once opened your personal account, you need to keep posting. Frequency depends on you and in this case there is no restriction — you can write 1-2 posts a dayweek or more than 100 a day.
When you reach a 1000 followers, you should seriously think about increasing the frequency of posting — to let people not miss your important post among thousands updates on their Twitter walls.
Mistake #2. No idea what to post
That’s the problem! You should think in advance about topics to post about. It may be about hobbies, work, education or cultural interests, etc. Especially if you want to promote your personal blog or website.
There are many discussions in social media whether the content is really making an impact on Twitter. I would answer both «yes» and «no». I say «yes» because Twitter is very convenient platform for sharing information. And those who are good writers may be successful here. At the same time, I would agree with those who say «no» to this question — only good content is not able to bring you success without understanding Twitter tools, and at least, without basic knowledge about how social media works.
Mistake #3. Misleading username and avatar
First, you should choose for yourself a catchy ID or be anonymous. If you work for a company and are going to post about professional interests, you should understand the risk: your posts could be recognized as the company’s position, which could raise problems. In this case, it would be better to choose a coded name, or to post openly in accordance to your company’s communication policies (and help to promote corporate values).
Usernames should be as short as possible. The restriction of 140 characters per post means that a username cuts space in replies. Less space in limited Twitter bothers people even more. In addition, a username should be simple to remember — something which clearly characterizes you or your interests.
If you are 30, a professional but choose a strange, childish avatar — who can rely on you seriously behind the close circle of friends who share interests and sense of humor? And you risk not to have more followers.
Mistake #4. Misleading background
Backgrounds are also important that shouldn’t be ignored. This can be a neutral picture from a default set. But it would be better if you select and set up a background picture, which reflects your personality, interests or hobbies.
Mistake #5. Misleading bio
It’s very important to let people know who you are. It’s not obligatory to describe yourself officially — some key words or phrases could describe you well and attract people to read your tweet feed.
Mistake #6. Ignoring people and not building relationships
One of the most important purposes of Web 2.0 is to interact with people online. Twitter is not an exclusion. Just talk to people, answer their questions, reply to interesting posts and discussions! It’s easy to store your dialogs by «mentions» or «favorites». Your interactiveness will not only increase your scores in Twitter measuring tools, but will help to build your online credibility.
Often discussions on Twitter open as a result of events or news, which attract people to talk about them. It’s easy to find them by key words search or «hash-tags», which are shown by #. You also may initiate discussions, for example about your life, or a particular story, etc.
Sure, you can meet on Twitter many arrogant people who just post about themselves — its better to avoid them, they are just collecting followers to show how cool they are.
Should you follow all of those twitter-ers who follow you? That’s an another issue in this topic. Of course, you shouldn’t follow them all. I mean business accounts through which businesses try to promote their goods and services. For sure, they need you, but you also have a choice.
To build relationships online, you should not forget to thank people for following, mentioning and re-tweeting you. It’s better to thank them privately by personal messages, or openly mention them back and re-tweet interesting posts as well.
Mistake #7. Spam and very personal tweets
Twitter calls you to be active by the message «What’s happening?». In reality, there’s no need to understand the message literally and start spamming. Ordinary posts like «Good morning», «Life’s boring», «The weather sucks», «I am at work», «I’m going to water closet», etc can be recognized as a spam, and may throw the people away from you. Many twitter-ers hate to read such posts and often unfollow you because of them. It’s better to write such thoughts to your diary, than to tweet.
This is your choice – whether to post very personal tweets or not. All what you post is visible and listed in search engines. Are you going to tell others how great a lover you are? Then, you should protect your tweet feed and share this news only with your closest friends (and offline).
Mistake #8. Bad behavior
Here everything is understandable — you should not argue, humiliate others, instigate illegal acts, etc.
Mistake #9. Ignoring tools
- Links are most important tool on Twitter. Post about breaking news without link to the source is a bad taste.
- Shortening links using services like bit.ly or tinyurl.com are welcomed.
- A hashtag is similar to other web tags — it helps add tweets to a category. Hash-tags have the ‘hash’ or ‘pound’ symbol preceding the tag, like so: #traffic, #followfriday, #hashtag. Hashtags can occur anywhere in the tweet: some people just add a # before a word they’re using.
- Twitter folks use replies «@user-name» at the beginning of their posts to talk directly to each other.
- People like frequently searching for their username to find the tweets that mention them. So, a mention is any Twitter update that contains «@username» in the body of the tweet. You can mention people anywhere in the post.
Mistake #10. Mass following
Some people follow dozens of other people every day, hoping to be followed back. This doesn’t actually work. I mean, you can get a lot of followers this way, but they will not be your audience to talk something about. As a result — no credibility, and no increasing scores.
Another aspect of mass following is following people with a lot of followers, the so called, Twitter Elite in your region or interests. People often do so, just to increase their own scores, because many Twitter measuring websites count this too.
Conclusion
I want to put a quote of a random man who complained to Twitter due to his low score, rating and lack of followers: «If I would read users’ experiences and advice before opening my account, I would never kill my reputation on Twitter…» Hopeless? Absolutely not. Because then he added: «So, now I’m going to create a brand new account!»
Good luck with your personal Twitter! And let me know in comments to my blog about other Twitter mistakes. This info can help someone in social media adventures.
Viktor Kovalenko is a public relations and communications professional. You can read his blog entries at http://viktorkovalenko.blogspot.com/
