Most Common Mistakes Made in Twitter for Business

Social media has been a great marketing platform for companies and firms in recent years, one of the most commonly used being Twitter. Companies are striving hard to get more followers, which will in turn increase brand awareness.

With Twitter being such a great tool, all businesses should leverage on its Inbound marketing* capabilities. However, there are some mistakes commonly made while doing this. We’ve compiled them into this blog post so that you and your company can avoid making these same mistakes!

Twitter is so easy to use—you create an account and input all the relevant company details in your bio, upload a decent profile picture and header picture that can tell a story to attract the public’s attention, start tweeting relevant information, and lastly, follow people, who will probably follow you back too.

The reason why companies look to Twitter to enhance their marketing efforts is because each tweet (Twitter status update) has a limit of 140 characters. This keeps the messages short and concise, which results in followers being more likely to read them. Besides, links can be added within the message to the companies’ homepage, and users can include up to 4 pictures for each post.

With all these advantages in mind, you will ask, “If everyone is doing this, what can I do to stand out from the rest?” Then you begin to find out more on tips and tricks to boost your brand awareness. However, are all these suggestions and tips accurate? Will they bring about more leads? Are they good for your business? While there are many things you can do to improve business, there are a few specific things you definitely shouldn’t do.

1. Follow, pause, and unfollow:

How it works:

1) X follows Y on Twitter.

2) Y follows back.

3) X waits for a few days before he/she unfollows Y.

4) X continues doing this to many others just to get a large group of followers.

Why not: Do not put your company at risk or set yourself up for failure by doing such actions. Eventually, these people might not even bother learning more about your business, click on your links, or buy from you. If they have realised that they have been tricked into following you, you can forget about them becoming your leads.

2. Buying followers:

How it works: Buy followers so that you appear to be reliable and well-known.

Why not: You won’t get much benefits from this. Yes, visitors may think that you are dependable and good, but how do you even get such visitors at the beginning when you are just buying followers? These followers that you have bought probably have no interest in what you put up on your page, hence they won’t retweet your tweet, or spread a word.

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3. Excessive use of #Hashtags

How it works: Others can find you easily by searching for hashtags.

Why not: Hash-tagging is a great tool to attract more leads. #But #you #cant #hashtag #everything! Hashtags should be used sparingly on important and relevant words only i.e. #inboundmarketing. ‘#everything’ does not even add any value to your tweet. By having a whole sentence of hashtags, your tweet will look messy and visitors will not even bother reading. You only have 140 characters, make it count!

A report from Salesforce has mentioned “Limit hashtags to one or two per Tweet. Our data shows that Tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags. Tweets that use more than two hashtags actually show a 17% drop in engagement.”

More is not always better.

4. Sending auto Direct Messages (DMs)

How it works: Sending mass messages with intentions to start personal conversations to anyone who follows you.

Why not: The message is not personalized, there is no specific information used for each person, and the DM is just generic. Nothing is personal! The user receiving the DM probably knows that it is automated as well. You may even lose followers because of your annoying auto DMs.

5. Only sending Tweets during peak times

How it works: According to SurePayroll, tweets should be sent out on Mondays to Thursdays from 1pm to 3pm as this is the peak time.

Why not: Although this is good information that we could take into consideration when tweeting, it is just a guide. More importantly, you have to understand what time your particular audience is active on Twitter and where they reside; do not forget that there is a time zone difference.

6. Pushing Tweets across other social networks

How it works: Posting the same tweet across all other social networks.

Why not: You should never post your tweets to other networks (Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.). These platforms are all different and have their own set of posting strategies to get the most out of it. Moreover, they do not have the 140 character limit. Take that extra few minutes to publish to each network each time. Don’t waste your resources!

7. Protected Tweets

How it works: Your tweets are protected when your profile is locked.

Why not: There is no point. Once you have locked your profile, your whole idea of marketing through social media has gone to waste. People will not bother to ‘Request to follow’, as it takes too much time and is a hassle to do so, even if it’s just a button. Also, people can’t retweet your tweets, this means you won’t get publicity. After all, you are looking into sharing information online, what are you afraid of?

8. Flooding updates

How it works: You try to provide as much information as you can to your followers.

Why not: It is true that you should regularly update and tweet new information and news for your followers. However, does this mean that you tweet 10 times in an hour? You will definitely grab the attention of your follower the first time round, seeing so many tweets in an hour. However, in a long run, that is certainly not what they want. There will be many other stories and news that they would like to read up on, not just on your company and your company’s products and services. Posting so much at a time will probably annoy them and this may create an adverse effect—they may unfollow you. On the other hand, don’t forget to update at least once a day to keep your followers! Be smart, tweet consistently and regularly.

Once you’ve made sure your Twitter practices are executed properly, you can further improve your online marketing efforts using marketing tools that will enhance your social media presence. Read more about them here.

* Inbound marketing is a form of digital marketing that involves SEO, Social Media, blog and landing pages to generate sales leads.

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