Your best friend does it. Your mom probably does too. Your design school professors definitely do it, and your boss does when he remembers. Twitter is hailed universally as the new frontier—the way everyone’s going to keep up with one another, 140 characters at a time.
But it’s not a cure-all. And any self-styled marketing guru who tries to sit you down and tell you about how to “leverage your brand” or “widen your network” or “build your tribe” is ignoring the quintessential rules about how to use Twitter. Here’s the secret, people: it’s about people. Not about brands. Here’s how to humanize it a little bit.
- Direct message spam is lame. Don’t send a “Thanks for the follow!” message to every single person that follows you. Know why? Because you can have a Twitter client do it for you. And most people who send these are doing exactly that—having a robotic Twitter client pose as them for the purpose of seeming more “real.” It’s wholly disingenuous, and I’ll tell you a secret: almost everyone I follow universally blocks the users that spam them.
- …But direct messages have a purpose. Ever been to a party where the host ignores all the guests to get into a inside-jokey conversation with her two roommates? This is what it looks like when you have personal conversations on Twitter in public. So don’t. Send a direct message if you need to tell someone any juicy private details.
- Follow other users with care. Anyone who follows 11,649 people within the span of a day might be looking to expand their network, and a handful of those 11,649 might actually follow you back. But think about it this way: can you really expect to have a meaningful exchange of information with 11,649 people? No, no one could. So why would you follow that many? It just looks sketchy. Seek to improve the exchange, and then follow accordingly.
- Put up an avatar, already. It doesn’t have to be a picture of you if you’re worried about preserving your anonymity. But not putting up an avatar makes your Twitter account look untended, and thus sketchy.
- Feed sparingly. I’ve heard mixed opinions on Twitterfeed, the client that updates your Twitter account with your RSS feed titles, but in general it feels distasteful to most users. Here again, it’s about the exchange of information. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally linking to your blog posts that you feel best about [full disclosure: I'm going to link this one], but clogging your friends’ Twitter pages by trumpeting your achievement every time you vomit two sentences onto your blog screams nothing if not, “Look at me, I’m a narcissist.”
- In general, don’t be a tool. Blatant plagiarism, Internet drama-mongering, incessant valueless retweeting, and bringing nothing at all to the exchange doesn’t help anyone. Especially not you. So don’t do it.
Do you guys tweet? What do you find most/least annoying about other Twitter users?