What NOT to tweet about

There are lots of articles and blog entries telling you what you should be tweeting about in your social networking campaigns. But there are still countless companies running appalling campaigns tweeting the wrong sort of things and annoying their followers.

It doesn't need to be like that.

Firstly, lets get the obvious out of the way. Nobody is interested in you brushing your teeth or what you're having for lunch (unless it really is something extraordinary).

Of course, if you're a food critic, your followers might actually be interested in what you're eating. And that's the key...relevance!

I used to follow a company that was so desperate to keep their tweet count up that they just kept posting links to BBC news website articles. They seemed to be under the impression that as long as they tweeted about something, anything, then that would somehow be effective.

I wasn't following them to get the latest news and current affairs. I know where the BBC news website is thank you very much.

It was just embarrassing to watch this company post such irrelevant rubbish because they thought that posting lots would somehow help their campaign. It's not a numbers game!

After several attempts to advise them to stick to relevant posts, I just stopped following them.

Nobody is interested in you being stuck in a tragic jam, unless you're going to tell everyone where it is so that we can avoid it. So the next lesson is to be helpful. Give people a reason to follow you.

I see it all the time where people are tweeting that they're stuck in a traffic jam but without telling everyone where it is. That could be a really useful tweet, but unfortunately, it just comes across as groping for sympathy.

Now, we all know that you're only really doing this to make money. But that doesn't mean you can just post all of your adverts and special offers. It's expected that you'll post them, but if you're not posting anything else, that's another sure fire way to lose followers. Make sure that you're posting more non-adverts than adverts.

Social networking is not social advertising, otherwise that's what they'd call it.

Lots of people are going to extraordinary lengths to avoid adverts these days, to avoid cold callers, TV advertising, junk mail, email spam and banner adverts. So not following you any more is quite an easy process for them.

The key to social media is finding "your thing". Finding something that provides people with a reason to follow you, and not just putting out any old rubbish just because everyone else seems to be doing it. The big problem with social media is that lot's of people are doing it, but not many are doing it well. Following the crowd isn't necessarily the right thing to do.

OpenGlobal E-commerce can help you to find "your thing" so that social media isn't just a time consuming exercise, but a cost effective marketing tool. If you need help finding out how to make social media work, contact us today on 0845 269 9624.