How NOT to look like a total loser on #Twitter: Social Media Professionalism
There are services out there which are incredibly useful to have, particularly if you like proper stats on where you’re at. However, openly advertising that you use these services can make you look like a woeful failure if you don’t have a massive following. For example:
That was one of the more cheery ones I saw this morning. 224 people walking away is a lot! I would be worrying if these were my stats.
I see numerous notices like this go through my stream every day. They are auto-generated. All services spit out these ads. If I use one, I go into Twitter fast and delete them. Plus, if I pay to subscribe to a service, I will remove all automatic options to have these services air my private laundry at their will.
I would never advocate not using these sites to clean up your following. They also removed dormant accounts and have many benefits. They are too good to ignore. Benefits include:
Finding inactive users and your unfollowers.
Finding relevant users to follow.
Keeping track of how your social media updates affect your follower/unfollower stats.
Checking the relationship between any accounts and doing a whole lot more (for a price on services this good).
I would recommend you never auto-follow anyone using them though: not only do automatic DMs mean I know you are insincere and have never seen me; you also follow every spammer out there, thinking you’ve got great stats when you’ve only got snake oil merchants and porn…
So be aware of who advertises what in your Twitter stream and how it makes you look. You won’t be sorry you did.
P.S. May I present to you the other side of the argument? Note that when you have many followers, this isn’t an issue but if you have a small number, the above still applies.
This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it.
Filed under: Writing Resources Tagged: goals, ideas, marketing, problem solving, promotion, social media, success, Twitter, writer, writing
