Meet Your Neighbors
March 11, 2009
As fairly early adopters of Twitter, it has been interesting to watch the “neighbors” move in. From a business-users perspective, we have observed that there are 4 kinds of people/brands living in the Twitter neighborhood:
- The Conversationalists. These are the people that “get it”. They are using Twitter as a way to participate in and start conversations. They are typically social off-line as well. Of course, they are not doing this just for the grins. They realize that these conversations will lead to growing their brands and potentially selling more stuff. For corporate big brands we would include Zappos, Ford, H & R Block, and Southwest. (Check out this great article from Mashable.com - http://mashable.com/2009/01/21/best-twitter-brands/).
- The N00Bs. These are the people that are new to Twitter and are making rookie mistakes. These mistakes include:
- Tweeting as a company, not a person. The bigger brands can get away with this because they already have a presence. Plus they don’t hide who the people are behind the brand.
- No photo, link, or incomplete bio. This is like walking around with a paper bag on your head and trying to introduce yourself.
- Letting your Following-to-Followers ratio get out of whack. If it is more than 2:1 Following v Followers, then you have some sort of digital body order. Or people aren’t following you back because you didn’t have a photo, link, etc as stated above.
- The Promoters. These are the people who see a large group of people and can’t help sell to them. They are the Twitter equivalent of door-to-door salespeople - or the people that put flyers under windshields. All they do is post tweets and links for promotional purposes. You can spot these people because they will be following several thousand people but only have a few followers. A sub-set of this crowd are those that obsess over their Twitter ranking.
- Black Hats - These are the spammers. The people that create bots that auto-follow based on key words, geography, etc. Twitter does a decent job of nailing these people (the “suspicious activity” screen you sometimes see).
Because Twitter is a conversation/word-of-mouth tool, it tends to purify itself from a combination of Twitter going after spammers and promoters - and members within Twitter blocking or calling out people who improperly use it.
Final thought …
For businesses interested in using Twitter, the most difficult thing to overcome is that Twitter is not a broadcasting medium; it is a conversation tool. If the culture of your brand is to talk to people, you will be fine. If it is not, you won’t.
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I’m new to Twitter and have more to learn. I’ve been sending tweets with my thoughts, observations, little updates, muses, etc., while everyone else is sending out 10 of everything they have to promote. I began to question the whole deal and lose some interest until I read this piece. I’m committed to being social on and off-line and learning more every day. Thanks for your blog–and Chamber seminar in February!
Nice job Justin! It’s been interesting to meet the new neighbors - some I welcome and others that make me cringe like I do when watching ‘The Office’. Was thinking of how much I’ve learned (my Twitter year anniversary is this weekend - bizarre to think about!) The conversations have brought more value to my life than I ever thought they would. And while there have been N00B stumbles along the way - the medium and the connection with friends and peers across the country has been gratifying to say the least.
It’s amazing how many people don’t think like people. Unless you’re Walmart, people buy from people. And there are many more people point I could make using the word ‘people’ in the sentence many more times. But I think I made the point.
People.