Why mass following on Twitter isn’t a good strategy for your business

by James Agate

Twitter has seen exponential growth in recent years and has become one of the most powerful social media marketing tools available to small business owners; however tweet with care. WLB guides you through the best ways to maximise your returns from Twitter based marketing.

In the beginning, Twitter allowed you to follow as many people as you wanted and many users had auto-follow enabled which meant that many so-called ‘social media experts’ could amass huge followings simply by mass-following as many users as they could lay their hands on. The I follow you so you follow me principle.

Twitter, in an effort to combat ‘follow spam’ put a very generous limit of 1000 follows per day. (I still think that this is far too high a number, who needs to ‘connect’ with a new 1000 people every single day?) Still, it has gone some way to combat the issue.

In case you hadn’t noticed Twitter is still quite full of self-promoters and sleazy internet marketers which is a shame because small businesses in particular can really benefit from the exposure and freedom of communication that Twitter can provide.

I have never understood the fundamental principle of mass-following people in order to build a following of your own. I accept that it might give you some credibility (“Wow! Business X has Y number of followers”) but when you really think about it what good is volume of followers?

Similar to tricking 1,000 people into entering a room for you to do a sales pitch, how many are interested in what you are talking about? And more importantly how many are actually going to buy? Probably none. Which is why it is far better to have a smaller but more relevant, targeted and engaged audience rather than some huge mixed barrel of followers who aren’t interested in your business.

On Twitter (and with other social media) it is the real conversations that get you return on investment (both in financial and customer satisfaction terms).

Now that Twitter has calmed down a bit in terms of the volume of spam flying about the Twittersphere, the only people who auto-follow now tend to be the blatant self-promoters. These are low-value followers in my opinion. Having these as part of your following is of no value to your business because they are only interested in plugging their own product.

As a small business owner your should stop obsessing over volume and carefully think about cultivating a better follower list. It is the age-old adage of “Turnover Follower count is vanity but profit engagement is sanity“.

Twitter provides a lion share of the traffic each and every month to WeLoveBusiness.co.uk and I strongly believe it can be a powerful tool for promoting your business and engaging with your customers providing you use it in the right way.

One example of a small business which has really got a handle on how to use Twitter is @HelsbyArms. The account is operated by Carole and there is a huge amount of human contact and conversation that goes on. Carole uses her account to communicate with customers, put out special offers, talk about related topics and share related links. She never writes a tweet which is just blatant self-promotion which is key when it comes to social media because it really is a two way process. Her business is benefiting because every time she tweets it reminds her customer about her business. Isn’t that part of what marketing is about?

5 top tips

1. Be human – automated republishing of the same content over and over is not going to score brownie points
2. Add value to the stream – be useful to your readers. Don’t be scared about sharing links that aren’t your own if you think they will be useful to your followers.
3. Reply to people and thank them for sharing – basic web manners in my opinion, but always thank people for sharing your content and reply if people ask you a question or make an observation. Twitter is about the conversation.
4. Stick at it – social media results don’t just happen over night. There is nothing worse than a Twitter account for a business which hasn’t been updated for months. Be sure to keep some consistency to your microblogging.

I think the most important rule of Twitter is to have a strategy and stick by it. Decide from the outset what you want to achieve with Twitter otherwise your tweeting could simply descend into an uncalculated waste of valuable time.

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