Becoming A Valuable Member of Twitter – Pitfalls to Avoid.
Last week I wrote about how to How to Positively Initiate Conversation Using Twitter. By being positive in your conversations you in turn become a valued part of the Twitter community of your choosing and the Twitter ecosphere as a whole. This is why we are on twitter, correct? We do want to have some bit of positive influence, to become a giving & receiving part of a positive community.
Every post we make influences the twitter community and hopefully in a positive way.
As part of our goal of becoming a valuable positive member there are certain pitfalls we should want to avoid.
Not Personalizing Your Account:
Fill out your profile – make sure you put up an avatar – give yourself a unique name that identifies you from the masses – let people know where you are from and tell people a bit about yourself in the bio. If you don’t do this, it makes it real easy for potential followers to press the delete/ignore button and judge that you are not going to fit into their community. It’s going to be hard to tell if you have anything to offer to their community if you’re not offering up anything about who you are.
There are a lot of ideas behind the “branding/marketing” of who you are – I’ll write my ideas on this next week.
Self-Appointed Authority:
Being a self-appointed authority might gain you the immediate gratification of a community that you quickly become a part of. However, the communities on Twitter are communities that listen – and as a community that listens they will see the authority you claim is self appointed – you’ll only be a member of that community temporarily. As an example, if you engage your community by negatively pointing out how you find a certain member doesn’t get Twitter or a certain brand is not using Twitter – you’re sending out negativity. Members of your community are not going to see you as an authority but more of a drag with loads of potential negativity to pull them under with. Instead, take that negativity and put a 180* spin on it and turn it into something positive for the community at large.
Used Car Salesman:
Don’t take every opportunity to sell me something. Most people have no problem if you’re trying to recruit members for a charity drive or if your hosting a kitchen products party. However, if your sole purpose on Twitter is to entice me into laying out 20 tacos on a Snuggie for every situation – I am simply not going to follow you – others are not as well – it’s hard to build and become part of a community if other twitters are not following you.
Being Someone You’re Not:
Be genuine – plain and simple. Do you find that employing an automatic direct message tool impresses people or insults their intelligence? If you want to connect with your new followers, take the time to send them a personal direct message. As Seth Godin says “authenticity is more important than getting noticed.” Twitter is the prime example of that. People want to get noticed, it is part of human nature. Being who you are will get you noticed on Twitter. Authenticity is going to get you into the community you desire.
Simply be yourself and allow your posts, your knowledge, your thoughts, your ideas and your conversation place you in the community.
Keep these points in the back of your head and watch as the twitter community flowers up around you this spring.
beebo.wallace is a guest blogger for GreenvilleTweets and can be followed at http://twitter.com/beebo_wallace or you can view all posts by beebo.wallace
