This is a guest post by Anil Gupta from ScopeForMoney.com.
Twitter is a great place for bloggers, internet marketers and even celebrities who are making an entry into it. But most of these users are not fully optimizing the potential of Twitter. Celebrities don’t need to do that, but bloggers and internet marketers need to be careful with Twitter.
It is important to understand that Twitter is not all about setting up an account and start tweeting. Your Twitter followers can be a source of great profit for you.
But due to a few mistakes, it is easy for many bloggers and internet marketers to lose focus on how to really optimize Twitter. The importance of Twitter as a branding tool cannot be undermined.
Understanding this, here is a list of 7 mistakes made on Twitter by bloggers and internet marketers for you to get an insight:
1. Following 1000’s Of Twitter Users
There are many sites which have a list of users who guarantee a followback. You can follow thousands of Twitter users in the click of a button. And many of them would followback, except most of those of followers hardly care about your tweets and then of course there are many auto-follows. If you want real reach in Twitter then it is important that your growth in number of followers occurs organically and in a manual manner. Otherwise, no matter how many thousands of followers you have – they are ineffective sources of traffic and reach for you.
2. Eliminate Auto-Followback/Auto-Direct message
This is the number one sign that you are more like a spammer. Remove the auto-followback feature from your Twitter account immediately. If you were a celebrity or some really important person then sure you could have automated it. But unfortunately, if you are reading this, then it is unlikely you are such a person. Moreover, auto direct-messages and auto follow back make a person feel that they are not in connect with a real human being. This is why you should always make the effort to manually follow back your followers.
3. Excessive URLs
You should really stop stuffing URL links on your Twitter bio and in your profile page background image. Put your link where it is supposed to go and not all over the place. If you are able to catch a pattern then you will see that if you stuff URLs all over your profile – it looks spammy and desperate. You are distracting concentration from a single link which the user could have clicked and get access to all your other URLs. Be professional and keep a clean Twitter profile.
4. Maintaining A Poor Tweet To Promotion Ratio
It is true that all your followers know that you will definitely use Twitter as a promotional tool. They get turned off when you begin to maintain a poor tweet to promotion ratio. Your followers also want some extra value apart from links to your blog posts and your affiliate recommendations. If you fail to give that to your readers then automatically you are putting them off.
So, make it a point to share interesting tweets and facts once in a while. Even sharing a few general personal thoughts you have is a great way to keep your followers engaged. This will ensure that your tweets to promtional tweets ratio are optimal.
5. Don’t Market Via The Bio Section
The bio is what it is – it is a bio that should have brief information on what you/your company is about. Don’t try to put anything marketing on your bio section. A poor bio will not only turn-off real users but you can also ensure that most users will not follow you. The bio should let others know what you are about. You can always sell them your products at other places than your bio section!
6. Poor Avatar
We all know that Twitter gives you the ability to add an Avatar for your profile. It is small 73px/73px no doubt, but it is a major branding opportunity. There are many who underestimate the value of an avatar. What you should understand is that there are a lot of tweets to a user at a given time, and an avatar helps when the user is scanning tweets and save time reading the username. Always choose an avatar wisely; it can be your logo or your personal photo.
7. Poor Integration of Twitter With Your Blog
Some bloggers just don’t advertise Twitter enough on their blog. Twitter has quickly become a major way to connect with your readership base. The time has come that you use your blog and Twitter as a single entity rather than treating them separately. Don’t scrimp on space when it comes to encouraging your readers to follow you on Twitter.
Last Words…
Twitter is a super-powerful social media tool as it can not only increase traffic, but improve your brand image drastically. The points I have mentioned above might seem a no-brainer but they are common mistakes made by most bloggers and internet marketers.
Twitter is all about connecting to your followers and indirectly gaining their trust to promote your brand. Use it with intelligence and then you will have a lot of gain.
Great, Great info on Twitter.
I have an account on Twitter, but I have not been using it like it should be.
That’s because I do not understand the proper use of Twitter. Many people say just auto-follow people, bulk follow people, but I don’t like that. It looks like spam, as you mentioned.
Any ideas how to grow naturally/organically and follow people who are actually people, and not look like a spammer while following?
Nabeel
I would suggest doing it gradually. Suppose you are on a blog and you like the content being offered by that blogger, most of bloggers are active on Twitter. So this way you will be following real people only..
thanks for that article, great advices for new twitter users. i’m following most of the mentioned tipps, but i can definitely improve the tweet/promotion ratio.
Great info, indeed.
One more thought concerning the avatars. You should, in my opinion, not change the avatar too often. Otherwise it will only confuse your followers. I just unfollowed some people, who changed their avatar every few days.
Jürgen
I really seen above mistakes done by blogger, specially poor bio and following 1000 of users.I guess its better to follow once with same interest and with whom you can exchange useful links.
cool dude, i missed out 2 point of automatic followback.
Thanks for sharing
I’m making top two mistakes, planning to fix those mistakes. Thanks for pointing out 😉
Love it! These are all excellent tips and ones that I follow. I have three thousand followers but I don’t think it’s excessive. Ultimately the goal (for bloggers) is to drive more traffic back to the blog, so it does help to have a large number of followers, so long as they are interacting with you.
Twitter and social media in general is becoming important for SEO as well , and having a good interactive twitter following could prove handy 🙂
Very informative post. Everybody is talking about twitter but this lesson is very good to use it wisely. Thank you for sharing.
I recently created a new twitter account for my blog site and I noticed after a few minutes, there were 2-6 requests from users who obviously were just using fake accounts with some obscure avatar pic… I’m sure there are some obvious mistakes right on there and I’d be glad to show them this article… =)