HN.Net Social Media Strategies

Five Ways Not to be Followed on Twitter

Unlike other social networks, Twitter is a very media-oriented network. A huge portion of the Twitter population is either selling something or else trying to get your attention for some other purpose. Either way, while FaceBook “friends” are very often real life friends, Twitter associations are much more likely to be a question of mutual observation.

Perhaps you are one of the people trying to get my attention? I’m certainly one of the people trying to get yours. But I’ve noticed a lot of you out there seem to be working hard *not* to find new followers. Clearly, while your name suggests you want followers, your actions prove otherwise. So after about a solid year of heavily concentrating on gaining followers and building influence, I’d like to share with you a few “do not” suggestions that are guaranteed to make your Twitter promotional experience a failed one:

1. Don’t fill out all your bio information

Biographical information may not be very important to a lot of people, but it does at least suggest that you are a real person who is engaged in the social network. If you want to avoid being followed, definitely leave your bio blank. Or better yet, to seem even more suspicious, fill your bio with inscrutable hashtags and keywords, along with the ever-popular phrase “I’ll follow you back!” Such things prove without a trace of doubt that you view the Twitterverse as your personal dumping ground. People hate that.

2. Be cute with your location

Many social networkers are looking for people who share common interests with them. But even better, despite the international nature – or perhaps because of it – many Twitter users actively seek out local personalities and businesses. So if you want to be sure not to be followed, take this opportunity to say something you find amusing in the “location” area of your bio. “In my own head,” or “where ever my bags are” or “Smugtown” let people know they’re not important enough to pass this information along to.

3. Be really, really specific with your location

Another great tactic is to be hyper-specific: don’t just say “Rochester, NY.” Say “1200 South Avenue.” Because that way, only someone searching for that specific location will ever find you. Or if you prefer, just pick the specific village inside the township in which you live. Sure, most people in the area would shorthand your location based on the nearest city. Or perhaps by a broad yet specific regional name like “Keuka Lake.” But not you! Because you don’t want to be found. So even if you are selling something that might attract out of towners, make sure that instead of “Finger Lakes,” you pick Manchester or West Junius.

4. Profile Avatar? Pht.

There it is: your Twitter avatar. Its an opportunity to re-enforce your brand with a logo or show off your personality with a picture or maybe just be friendly and include a picture of yourself. There are so many opportunities with pictures that words cannot touch! Best to avoid it, then, and let Twitter pick your avatar for you.

5. Be very, very sparing in your tweets

Every Twitter user has a limit of how many people they can follow. This isn’t a problem for the average user, since people who are just being social will probably never come close to their maximum of 2000 follows. But those of us who are promoting our own thing are often following our maximum number of accounts and so need to be somewhat selective about whom we follow, as I’m sure you understand. So, if you’re looking to be avoided, definitely try to keep your posts under a weekly or even monthly basis. Only use Twitter when you have something really, really important to say. That way, when you do post, you’ll be sure no interested party is actually listening.

I hope you’ve found this list illuminating. Now that I’m done, I can desist with the snark and tell you that every single one of the mistakes listed above is repeated over and over again – maybe only one, maybe all of them! – in Twitter accounts that positively litter the ‘sphere. If you’re not looking to be followed, well then, you can do with your account as you like. But as I mentioned above, those of us actively promoting our wares online will need to make space on our Twitter follow lists, and obeying the above rules is a sure-fire recipe for getting unfollowed!

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Your Readers Know Why They Follow. Do You?

Increasingly, I find that my need to express myself online and communicate with my audience can be summarized within the bounds of Twitter’s 140 character limit. And increasingly, we’re all finding it necessary to move to Twitter’s instant form of communication to connect with our audiences, regardless of our preferences. As we move further into this territory as optimizers, marketers, developers and techologists, we look for ways to validate our work and quantify our success. Fortunately, I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that Twitter’s instant response actually shows much more detailed profiles of our audiences than the over-bloated metrics systems developed for websites.

Because of course, a huge part of being a valuable member of the Twitter information sphere is passing along links and articles. Links, rather than being the simple inline bibliographies of your articles, are now the primary source of content. And links are always very easy to track.

Thus it is essential to any social media strategy that we avail ourselves of the services of a good link shortening system, or else roll our own. Bit.ly is the service I use, through my shortening domain lsdfe.net. With this service, I can get instant access to my audience’s clicking appetites as they manifest themselves.

You know who clicked the link, who made the link, where the link was being viewed, where the link goes. You also know the time of day that the link was clicked and within reason, the surrounding text that it was included with. And you only know about these things when the user has clicked – therefore, you only gather data from clients that were interested enough in what you’re doing to engage. This is the holy grail of metrics. Whether a reader clicked or didn’t click your link is a binary vote for or against your content, your sentence structure, your tone.. anything. And once you have a baseline – your audience’s opinion – you can begin to really experiment with what message sells the best.

Does your audience like their links opinion-free? Some people tell me that they notice when they add commentary to their links, the click-through changes; some better, some worse; some audiences respond to snark, others thoughtfulness, but regardless of the outcome, it changes. Does order of the information make a difference to your audience? I have personally found that a basic, pithy headline, followed by the link, then by commentary works best for my audience. It may be different for yours. What subjects to they respond best to?

I’ve actually taken to blocking out my weeks around experiments with my Twitter feed. I might restrict myself to one single topic on each of five successive work days. Or I might try posting at different times of day. One interesting thing I have discovered is that the first five minutes of a tweet determines it’s entire life cycle. If no one clicked on the link in the first five minutes, no one will at all. However, there seems to be a late shift of my readers that will boost my click through rating sometimes hours after a link has posted. So, I have some active and some passive followers out there.

These insights help you to make your content that much more engaging for the audience we all want to inform and entertain. I’ve found that simply blocking my days out according to subject has boosted my click through rate by about 33%. That’s no joke! So, give it a shot, yourself. Eliminate variables, post consistently in at least the one way you want to test, and see what your audience thinks.

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