It’s human nature; if there’s something you can do or use that will essentially lessen the time it takes you to complete a certain task then you’re going to make use it aren’t you?

So with that established, when shouldn’t you be taking that short cut?

The answer with Twitter is when it adds no value, or detracts rather than adds to your overall presence.

Scheduling your Tweets

We do it, you probably do it and your neighbours and competitors are more than likely at it too. So if we’re all scheduling tweets, is there any real scenario in which we shouldn’t?

Given the title of this blog post you won’t be knocked off your seat when we say yes there is. Scheduling shouldn’t be used as a sales tool, nor should it be used as an alternative to actually tweeting and interacting with other users in real time.

The majority of our scheduled tweets will be us sharing articles such as this one, which hopefully gives some guidance to those wanting to know more about digital marketing techniques. It’s not a steady stream of ‘buy a website’ or other sales information, which quite frankly we find as annoying as you would when we come across an account using those tactics!

We’re scheduling because there’s an incredible amount of content on Twitter, and like you we don’t have the time to be online throughout the entirety of the day. It’s giving us a presence when we’re busy working for our clients, but it still accounts for less than a quarter of our tweets in a week.

We gain more from interacting, tweeting others and engaging with them.

That’s where the real value and business comes from on Twitter; don’t be tempted to load on a couple of weeks of scheduled tweets and walk away thinking the job is done. It most certainly isn’t!

Those dastardly automated messages

A complete bugbear of mine but I shall refrain from ranting and stick to why they don’t really add value…

So you follow a new account, and within 10 minutes you get a direct message saying that they’re incredibly grateful for your follow, and perhaps you’d now like to follow every single account that they have, subscribe to their blog, and generally immerse yourself in their brand for ever and ever.

What’s wrong with this I hear you ask?

The thing is I know it’s an automated message. You’ll know it’s an automated message and the fact that it’s automated means no real effort has gone into it, nor is it reaching me on a personal level, which social media should.

I, like everybody else, am getting a standard message imploring me to like a Facebook page (more often than not this is the end goal).

The numbers of people that use this sort of tool and then never actually tweet you is incredibly high. Far higher than the number of people who having received the message are going to like the Facebook page.

With that in mind I think if someone new has followed you, why not take the chance to tweet them rather than sending the standard message?

As we said about scheduling tweets, this is where the real value from Twitter comes from.

It also works the other way round; we find that if you have three to five interactions with an account (interactions meaning liking, retweeting or commenting on their tweets) at the point of following them the average number of accounts following you back rises from around four to eight out of 10.

Interacting on social media being a winner; who would have thought it!

We lost 2 followers this week?

So you want to have a clear out of your Twitter account and go to any number of sites that help you do that more efficiently than going through Twitter.

Fair enough, nothing against that, but is there a need to send a tweet every week for the rest of your life saying that you’ve added or lost X number of tweets each week.

Aside from the embarrassment of those that automatically tweet about losing followers in the last week, nobody really needs to know!

These automatic tweets can be turned off so we encourage everyone to do so, it’ll undoubtedly be a happier Twitter world!

For more information about how we can help you focus your social media activity please give us a call on 01566 784860 or email hello@mihidigital.co.uk