Twitter For Business: What To Avoid

Here are three things your business must avoid doing on Twitter.

Image by ucumari via Flickr

1. Avoid all those offers to buy a product that gets you followers.

Products like Social Blaster are just a waste of your money. The tweeterer is simply trying to make some money as an affiliate. Do not buy. If you get a tweet from someone who links to these products, he or she is a spammer. Simply block these people.

2. Avoid signing up to use auto-DMs.

Some third party applications offer you a service where you can automatically post a tweet to a person who follows you for the first time. Do not do it. Do not auto-DM people who follow you. This is simply not social. This makes you look like an idiot to many people; yeah, it really does. No one wants to do business with an idiot; yeah, really that's true.

3. Avoid anything that has you cluttering up your followers with a stream of tweets only seconds or a few minutes apart.

While you can hold conversations on Twitter, do not have one where there is a long list of tweets back and forth over a few minutes. You are being inconsiderate to your other followers as it takes up too much space on their home page. After a couple of tweets back and forth, either take your conversation to DM or email.

There is also a service, twitterfeed, which is a great concept but one which I do not recommend. Twitterfeed allows you to have your posts from your blog feed into your twitter account automatically. Unfortunately, the service is not reliable. Your followers will suddenly get a week or more of your blog posts at the same time; again, no one wants their Twitter account to be spammed in that way.

I hope you avoid using these things on Twitter. Of course, I didn't mention using a hard sell approach with your tweets because by now you know that is totally wrong.