3 Mistakes You Don’t Know You’re Making on Twitter

Don’t fret! If you’re making any of these mistakes, you can easily correct them. Then watch your Twitter account grow relationships and gather leads in much less time than you can imagine.

1. Not following the right people

When you first create your Twitter account, Twitter tries to be helpful by suggesting you follow a ton of people you’ve never heard of. Avoid taking them up on their offer like you did when your best friend’s mom wanted to introduce you to her nephew (“a nice boy with a good personality”) in your college sophomore year.

The accounts that Twitter suggests are usually famous movie or tv stars, magazine accounts or other accounts that have a huge following. If you don’t already know, accounts that have a huge following often don’t follow back. If they don’t follow you back, then you are never in their feed and thus they don’t know you exist. Ouch. But it’s true. How much good will this do for you or your business? (The answer is none, BTW.)

2. Not Responding to a Tweet Properly

When you find a tweet that you’d like to respond to, click on the Retweet icon (see red arrow below) so that the original tweet and your response to it stay together when other people see it. Otherwise, others will see just two free-flowing tweets and most likely not know they were meant to be read together.

If you were to hit the Reply icon (see green circle), Twitter will automatically put the Twitter handle of the person you’re replying to in the tweetbox first. If you want only the people that follow BOTH you AND the person you’re replying to, to be able to see your tweet, this is the way to go. My guess is, you’d like everyone to see your tweet, so remember this Twitter rule:

Never start a tweet with the @ sign. Even just putting a period in front of someone’s Twitter handle gives the tweet the ability to be seen by all.

3. Not participating in #FollowFriday

Fridays are always party days on Twitter! This is hands down the busiest day of the week on this platform. If you have people that you’ve enjoyed tweeting with, or people whose attention you’d like to get, add them to a #FollowFriday or #FF tweet. It’s a great compliment to those that you add in a #FF tweet because you’re telling the world they are great accounts to follow. You’re helping them get more followers and hopefully they will, at some point, reciprocate.

The best thing about this is that you’re following people that you already have things in common with, so very likely, you also have things in common with the people they follow. Super easy way to expand your network.

After you’ve made these corrections, tweet me at @AskForLiz or leave a comment below to let me know if this helped. Do you have other questions? I’d love to hear them.

ONLINE MARKETING LIBRARY