Five Ways Businesses Can Ruin Twitter for the Rest of Us
While the beauty of Twitter is in people being able to talk to other real people for business or personal reasons, that side of human nature that loves efficiency, tries to commoditize human engagement and interaction. The most influential and successful Twitter accounts, business and otherwise, are ONLY the most personal ones (hint, hint). Some businesses know this and do a great job. Some, not so much. The ones that don't do a very good job, either don't really care about their audience and are trying to make a quick buck, OR, they do care but are new to social media and hired the wrong agency to get them off the ground.
I have a quite a few keyword streams I watch for business reasons and lately I'm starting to feel like I spend more time managing my block lists and finding tools to combat garbage than I do discovering new and interesting people that I find valuable. My multi-column keyword search setup on Tweetdeck is now starting to look like a freakin' landfill of algorithmic chaos. Here are some things I'm seeing a lot of lately that are driving me nuts. Some of these are old, some of them are new, but all of these activities have more than doubled in the last 3-6 months.
- Creating multiple accounts (10 or more) and then pushing out the exact same tweet with the push of one button, multiple times a day.
- Regularly scheduled Auto-DM's that try and sound like they're genuinely talking to you.
- Tweeting nothing but full length URL's for SEO purposes.
- Paying agencies to coordinate pools of hundreds of "home-based business" Twitterers who get paid based on quantity of tweets and click-to-conversion. Often times these people don't care about who sees their tweets, nor do they have any interest in the companies they were hired to tweet on behalf of. Hello PR minefield, may I have another?
- Tweeting with no real alignment to an objective.