15 Must avoid twitter mistakes!
Taking advantage of Twitter the Right way.
Twitter is exploding and their is absolutely no reason why we all should not take
advantage of this great social media. – SJ
Twitter is not like most of the social media sites, in fact twitter is a platform for micro blogging and millions of people are using twitter for various purposes with celebrities, bloggers & Internet marketers leading in the race of the twitter domination game. Their is no doubt in twitters power and what it could do to your business but twitter also has its limitations, most people do silly mistakes and could possibly lose a vital opportunity of using twitter. If you are micro blogging using twitter then you need to read them carefully.
Here are the 15 MUST AVOID twitter mistakes that could damage your business or reputation.
1. Using Mass mailing and Direct messaging bots
How is it a mistake?
Most of us tend to think that others will feel much better if we send them direct messages, this is true if you do it manually but not so if you use a bot, because a bot will send message to your twitter followers instantly after they start following you and your followers can easily identify that you are using bot, most of them un-follow and some of them might even report you for spam!
Update: Where did the direct messages go in the new twitter? Twitter has taken care of this problem but now you can use mentions, like @sameerjoad to catch my attention, works similar to direct messaging other then the fact that its open tweeting.
2. Following to your limit
How is it a mistake?
When most of us start on with twitter for the first time we are very eager to grow our followers, in fact some of them try to do that within few days, which is not only impossible to achieve but is very foolish on your part.
Twitter has a max follow limit, you can’t follow after your first 2000 followings unless their are 1850 people following you! If you keep following and hit your limit you will stay their for days and find yourself losing more of your followers as most of them think you are just adding lots of followers in a hope to get them to follow you back and grow your followers in return, but this tactic wont work if you try to do it overnight, specially if you show the follow limit of 2000 for months till you get your own 1850 followers.
Other then just losing your own followers you could also lose your account as twitter hates spammers and can flag you if you follow so many people during any 24hrs period, they will add you to your ‘suspicion list’. The best way to avoid this is to follow only the people you wish to follow for tweets & unfollow those who don’t follow you back.
3. Not unfollowing the non-mutual’s
How is this a mistake?
Non-mutual are basically the people you follow who do not follow you back, if you don’t remove these non-mutual’s from your follow list then your follow list will hit the limit and take your precious space!
Let me put it this way, you have 1000 followers and you follow 2000 yourself, out of these 2000, 1000 of them are non-mutual’s and they do not follow you back, now excluding the people you love to follow like some celebrity or news tweets etc [who usually don't follow back] there will still be a large number of non-mutual’s, if you don’t remove them, then your followers will grow very slow or might no grow at all! If you removed 600 of them then you could follow 600 others and possibly convert 300 of those 600 into your own followers thus growing your own follower base!
4.Not Following Back
How is this a mistake?
This is a huge mistake on your part, mostly because of 2 reasons
a. you might lose your followers since you are not mutual and occupy their space and they expect you to follow back
b. you could be losing huge information or valuable tweets from those potential followers
their is a exception if your some top celebrity or well know person, but you still miss a lot on reason ‘b’.
Update 2011: I recommend to NOT follow everyone who follows you, specially the fake twitters (dating profiles, etc), the inactive ones, the overactive ones (who tweet more then 25 times a day), the spammers (who only tweet with links), the self promoters or weblogs (Internet marketers promoting their make money online offers or spamming you with links), the wannabes (fans of celebrities), etc. Why is that? Because you will have hundreds if not thousands of tweets on your home page & it really gets annoying when things start cluttering up.
5. Not Optimizing twitter
How is this a mistake?
Not optimizing twitter means that your just using the basic twitter layout both on your twitter homepage and on your personal sites.
This mistake won’t affect you a lot, but changing the background, writing a short bio, linking to your website and good logos can really boost your rate of followers and popularity among fellow tweeples!
You might have noticed that even i myself did not do a lot of optimization mostly because i am lazy and too busy but their is no excuse when it comes to making money out of twitter. (i have added it this to my to do list, so i expect my twitter profile to change soon).
Also if you just use a link on your own site or blog to your twitter account then your less likely to get noticed then using images, icons, plugin’s or awesome widgets!
Using a ‘tweet this post’ widget can really bring you a lot of viral traffic and indulging yourself in other twitter related site like twittercounter.com or tweetmeme.com can really be a boost, but always be careful if that site is legit.
Update 2011: You can use ‘addtoany’ or other social promotion tools to take advantage of all the different social media platforms & not just twitter!
6. Re-Tweeting Multiple people at same time
How is this a mistake?
Re-Tweeting or RT for short means you tweet someone else’s tweet and giving proper credit to the original twitter.
RTing can be fun, exciting and very useful because not only you share someone else’s message to your follower and gain their respect but at the same time let your followers get variety other then your usual tweets with new content, it can be viral also.
Now you must be wondering what is wrong with RTing? Well the mistake is in the method you do it!
Mostly the correct way to do it is like this
RT @Sameerjoad – Hey check out this new video at youtube.com
but most people wants to RT multiple tweets at the same time and they do it like this
RT@Sameerjoad , RT@mr.x, RT@mr.y……..etc
such users tend to think that all of their followers will actually click each of those users to check their tweets from your single tweet, this would never work!
in fact some people find it very annoying and can actually start blocking you or un-follow you or even report you!
So avoid multi RTing in same tweet, if your very lazy then just don’t RT it at all!
Update 2011: Twitter has taken care of this & now there is a automatic retweet function, using @ tags now serves as mentioning, yet again mentioning to many people at the same time can be a bad thing.
7. Self Promotion and limitations
How is this a mistake?
limiting your twitter usage to only promoting your products and services can be very bad for you, you know you are self promoting if your doing one of the below, so stop these activities if you wish to build a community & good following.
a. Calling yourself a ‘social media expert’ or ‘guru’ in your twitter bio or telling others that they can ‘make money online‘ or ‘increase their twitter followers’ in your ‘bio’ shows your sole purpose on twitter is self promotion and making money, this should be avoided as you will find yourself losing lots of followers. Twitter is a social media site and you should use it like one, be original and let your bio space limited to your bio only.
b. tweeting only about your site, products or links will result in followers running away from you as your giving them only business talks and links and the only people who will be following you are those who are doing the same as you are doing, thus resulting in loss of potential customers.
c. tweeting the same message more then once - some people or all of us know that even if you have 10000 followers the chance of your tweet being read by all of them is close to zero, because they will be following so many people and have many tweets following around or simply because they are not around at the time you tweet. Because of this some people tweet same message over and over and over and some do that more then 100 times in a week. This is considered spamming.
your followers will find it annoying and will go away.
Update 2011: According to recent study, the exposure to your tweets depend on the amount of followers you have, their level of activity, the number of followers they have & the message of your tweet. A tweeter account with 10k followers will see an exposure of 100 – 500 eyeballs on average, with a CTR of 0.7 – 10% depending on the tweet itself.
8. Using Twitter as social network
How is this a mistake?
Many people argue about this, but the sooner you realize the better it will be, twitter is not a social networking site, it is a social media platform. Its NOT like facebook, myspace or other top social networks, you can’t have the same level of privacy, features or usage as that of a social network.
Why am i telling you this? because twitter is a micro-blogging platform, it does not have all the features as that of a normal social network site, you won’t find your friends enjoying twitter the way they do in facebook and you should get used to it also, twitter has its own advantages.
What am trying to say is that on normal social networking sites, all you basically do is add friends, do some wall posting, upload pictures and most of us check our facebook or myspace few times a week or daily, but twitter is not the same and you will defiantly need more effort to get noticed, so use twitter for what its meant to be used for, what are you doing? but of course not limited to that only, in other words don’t try force your friends or net workers to join twitter if they are your friends on facebook, some of them might not find it useful while others might.
Update 2011: Twitter is starting to bring in more social networking features & with so many twitter based services such as twitpic, etc you can do quite the same. But yet again twitter is not a social network but a social media platform, that does not mean that you cannot network with people on twitter, commonly known as tweeples.
9. Tweeting in different languages
How is this a mistake?
Although its good to have people from all around the world using twitter and having them as your followers, but everyone knows that basic language of twitter is English.
I don’t know about the legal issues you might have to face if you send a tweet in a different languages since i never did that myself, but tweeting in another language could also kill your followers as not all might be from your same place, or knowing that particular language, not all might be having that language pack installed in their browsers so your just loosing more followers if you did that.
And since English is know to all of twitter users [if they didn't know it they won't be their!] its much advisable to tweet in English unless you promote a specific thing in a specific region or have read and understood twitters terms and conditions.
Twitter has a set of their own languages so if your language is not included i recommend you not tweet in that and contact twitter staff for more questions.
Update 2011: You can tweet in different languages, but be careful if your followers are English speakers. Tweeting in your local language if allowed by twitter can actually be an advantage in getting local followers & more exposure via twitter search.
10. Trusting anything and everything
How is this a mistake?
With the rise in twitter’s success there has been a steady increase in the number of scam sites as well.
Twitter unlike other social media sites grants access to other ‘applications’ to access your twitter account from their sites, other social sites allows the applications to link to them first and then provides users with a database of applications to choose and use.
This feature of twitter is very unsafe, since their are tonnes of website who could tell you that they are a twitter application and promote something like ‘get 10000 visitors in 1 week’ and to sign up they ask you to enter your account information usually your twitter account information, some of these sites are legal and not doing anything suspicious but not all are like that. That’s why you should be careful specially from sites that may look just like twitter [such links might be promoted to you by others or even in DM from your twitter account and thus catching your attention unnoticed]
Twitter.com scam sites
Update 2011: In just 2 short years twitter has done lots of changes, recent changes in twitters developer & API access services now make it impossible for scam sites to operate, twitter also monitors all twitter based sites using their network & API. So i guess this problem has been solved. However there are still sites floating around that asks you to ‘Enter your login details’ in order to use the service they offer, NEVER do this as twitter has made it clear that all twitter based services should use the twitter developer app API.
11. Using multiple accounts on twitter
How is this a mistake?
Its not hidden that many people actually have multiple twitter accounts, they might be using one for business another for personal purpose and some even have 10 accounts dedicated to their 10 different sites or services, this not only requires them to manage and tweet on 10 accounts but they actually try and get the same number of followers on each one, it becomes very annoying for your followers and very hard for you to actually manage multiple accounts!
That’s why its always advisable to use 1 single twitter account even if you promote multiple services because not only this gains you large number of followers but customers or users of 1 site knows your other services and sites form your tweets thus helping increase traffic.
Update 2011: It is legal to use multiple accounts on twitter, however if found spamming even on one account you risk all your accounts connected to that IP. Please remember that multiple accounts are hard to maintain & can be a daunting task, so think before you proceed.
12. Faking to be someone else
How is this a mistake?
Twitter lets you create a user account and almost all great and well known companies have their twitter accounts!
But some smart people in order to gain popularity and followers they try to fake themselves to be someone else, their have been recent cases of a top celebrity or well known names/personalities using twitter, but later those twitter users were confirmed to be fakes and they had to face several punishments for celebrity impostor!
in fact twitter recently launched a celebrity impostor act to protect the identities of those celebrities, so if your found doing so not only will you lose your twitter accounts, face legal actions but you might even end up facing online harassment’s from those millions of fans, don’t play someone be yourself!
Update 2011: You can get banned for faking to be someone if reported by the original person. Twitter has a verified account system for real celebrities, unless you don’t have that verified badge you risk account banning even if you are the real celebrity.
13. Not Protecting and claiming your id or brand
How is this a mistake?
Just as faking to be someone is a mistake, not protecting your brand id and your public profile is a mistake on your part also.
Specially for people who have multiple products, services and websites, these brand owners find themselves in hardship as sometimes the smart twitterholics will register accounts with your brand name, and cause you loss of traffic and income, in fact they can damage your identity and drive your customers away by posting unwanted or painful content about you or your service.
Lets say for example you have a site called ‘make money with me’ and you have another site called ‘learn to blog with me’, now you go on twitter and register yourself a account which might be just your normal name like ‘sameerjoad’ even though you might use the same account for all your sites, someone out there might register a twitter account that goes with your site names, and he could be making money from your products, service and sites. (affiliate marketers do that, shocking but true!)
This is why you must protect your brand id, even if you don’t use those so many accounts you can create them as a safe keep for the sake of protecting your ID and you can divert all traffic or followers of those accounts to your original account.
14. Selling/buying twitter accounts
How is this a mistake?
Twitter does NOT allow you to sell your twitter accounts and it is against their policy if you do so, but still their are people with the same ideology that ‘rules are meant to be broken’ and they do break them, if you think you can make a account with 1000 followers and then later sell it to someone then you better be careful as twitter is watching you.
Selling accounts on twitter has grown recently with the growth of twitter, this has been mostly related with people who do identity faking and then later sell those accounts to the original owners to make some quick cash, but doing this can get your accounts[all of them] banned and your twitter days are over.
Also if found doing so by your followers[which is obvious since the tweets will change] they will start unfollowing you as well, so even buying twitter accounts with 10000 followers is useless and illegal, so watch where you put your money it might just get wasted.
Stay safe don’t try illegal tricks to make a quick buck, its my job to warn you the rest is up to you.
15. Using bots/hacks and scripts on twitter.
How is this a mistake?
It is very well known that no one can use twitter to its maximum potential without using other applications, their are tonnes of twitter applications, bots, scripts and hacks, almost all are legal but not 100% of all.
In fact scripts like ‘tweet this post’ or RT or auto add etc are not bad at all, they make your twitter experience very quick, smooth and gives you the ability to utilize twitter to its full potential. But hacks and scripts that are made by 3rd parties or anyone with a scripting knowledge can be very risky, in fact using hacks and bots like direct mailing are very annoying and will affect you indirectly.
Twitter scripts like auto tweets, which keeps posting a pre-written message after intervals of time is very annoying and risky, because twitter is a platform for you to express yourself, not a place where you keep tweeting auto spam messages all day around.
There are many ‘do it yourself’ guides on the Internet where some self proclaimed gurus teach you how to create your own twitter plugins, ads, hacks, scripts and bots and most of them ask you to insert codes pre-written by them in your site files, like the theme file or plugin directory of wordpress, such things can mess up your blog or site if you don’t have any knowledge and can even infect your servers, this has happened before and the infections could lead to you having issues with your hosting company. (Similar tricks are used for facebook, using javascripts!)
And last but not the least using scripts,bots and hacks takes the fun away from the real twitter experience which is tweeting on your own and not making tweets that contains lots of links or a one that goes of every single minute, this could effect your followers interest in your service.
That’s all for 15 must avoid twitter mistakes, took me around 2 days researching and writing on it but always ready to help.
Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,
SJ
8 Responses 
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Hi,
Super post, Need to mark it on Digg
Have a nice day
Hobosic
sameerjoad.com – da best. Keep it going!
Thanks
SonyaSunny
Good post.. Some bits made me laugh abit. Nice to have a genuine quality to posts
Just keep making good posts.
I have been working on my Twitter followers, trying to build them up. Is this worthwhile down the road if I want to make money by marketing to them?
Your site is great!
Cheers for posting this up. Could be very useful to me.
Nice write up and I checked out your twitter account and wow you have a lot off followers already!
.-= Napir´s last blog ..Jonah Hex (2010) =-.