I follow a lot of people in the WordPress community from my @themelab account, a number of whom run their own businesses based around WordPress. If you run a business on Twitter, there’s a good chance your clients and other (potential) customers follow you.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen Twitter postings from people which essentially mock their customers. Here’s some of the common ones I see from the commercial themer crowd:
- Wow, this clueless customer of mine just posted a total newbie question on my support forum. Check it out! (screenshot link here)
- Haha, someone who used a pirated version of my theme just got hacked and now their entire blog is ruined. Too bad for them.
- This site just switched away from my awesome SEO-optimized theme and now it looks like total crap, say bye-bye to search rankings.
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This whole “I follow you, you follow me” mentality on Twitter has bothered me for a while. Basically, it goes like this: if someone follows you on Twitter, it’s “rude” not to follow them back. This is nonsense. Why? Here are a few reasons:
- Interest Factor – You should follow someone on Twitter because you’re interested in what they have to say. People should follow you on Twitter because they’re interested in what you have to say. Period.
- Spam Factor – A lot of your new followers are probably spammers just waiting for you to take the bait and follow them back. Then they’ll fill up your DM box with teeth whitening offers and phishing links.
- Fake Ego Boost – If one of your followers is also following 50,000 other people, chances are they aren’t paying attention to anything you say. They might use a program like TweetDeck to filter a small list of tweets they actually do want to see. Who cares if someone follows you if they don’t even read what you have to say?
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Every Friday on Twitter, users on Twitter recommend other people to follow using the #followfriday hashtag. This sounds nice in theory, it gives tweeters a chance to suggest and find other cool people to follow.
Unfortunately, some people do it so, so wrong. Do you make these mistakes?
List a bunch of people without any context – This is when you tweet something like the following:
#followfriday @arandomperson @totallyunrelatedperson @someotherguy @someothergal @whocares @nooneispayingattentionanymore
What’s the problem? There’s no context. Noone knows why you’re suggesting these people to follow. Who are they? What do they do?
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