Twitter just flashes by, doesn’t it? For an introvert, who really likes to take a few minutes to chew on an idea, that can be a touch disconcerting. Still, folks love it, and businesses increasingly see it as a viable tool.
So, in the spirit of disseminating knowledge, I’m posting hints from Ilana Bercovitz on Twitter blunders small businesses make (). She’s come up with 10. I’m going for the five that seem most important to me, though they’re all great.
- Shameless self-promotion ‒ What?!! That’s an article of faith in American society. Still, hold back a bit.
- Retweeting yourself ‒ No, it’s not efficient. It’s lazy. If you want to tweet about the same content, find another way to say it.
- Using multiple hashtags in a tweet ‒ They make your tweet annoyingly unreadable.
- Tweets that are too long ‒ Huh? Tweets are short by definition. But leave enough characters to allow people to add commentary, @mentions, etc. when retweeting you.
- Irregularity ‒ Tweet every day.
Ms. Bercovitz is not a big fan of robo-tweeting and recommends moderation—believing that followers want to see the real person behind the tweets. I get that, but it’s my way of dealing with a busy schedule and still trying to participate. I’m a big fan of Hootsuite, which makes it possible to queue up tweets promoting my blog and other interesting content and spread them out over a few days. And, the Ragan feed has some great stuff about writing, editing, and PR. So, I plan to continue. There’s enough “human” stuff from me to balance out.
What you do you think?
