Twitter can be different things to different people — A social network, a marketing avenue, a professional network, or all of the above. Regardless of how you use it, there’s value in having a big audience, even if it’s just for your ego.
I’ve helped a few folks grow their presence on Twitter and along the way I’ve seen countless people make the same simple mistakes that hurt their ability to grow their audience.
The following is a list of the five most obvious and easiest-to-fix mistakes I’ve encountered. If they sound overly obvious to you, you’ve probably been around Twitter long enough to see how many people they’re not obvious to.
1. You follow the wrong number of people
You’d be forgiven for thinking the number of people you follow is completely up to personal preference, but the truth is that it can say quite a bit about you.
The underpinning of this is that many of your prospective connections on Twitter are interested in mutual interaction, reciprocal retweeting, and personal connection. If you’re using some sort of following “strategy”, there’s a good chance what you’re doing is plainly transparent to most people.
Here’s how they might interpret your following habits:
- Hardly following anyone (<100) — At best, this reads that you’re not really using Twitter as a social network and will be unlikely to follow someone new back. At worst, if you only follow a handful of people and have thousands of followers, you’ll look like you think you’re a big-time celebrity.
- Following too many people (1500+) — It’s unlikely you’re catching what most people are tweeting at this point, and that makes people think they’ll be unimportant to you or go unnoticed.
- Following LOADS of people (5000+) — This comes across as you just manipulating Twitter to gain more followers or have people see your spam.
- Following the same number of people who follow you — This also reads as a manipulation and desperate plea for low-value follow-backs.
In general, I try to follow around 800–1000 people, but over time that tends to creep up. From time to time you’ll want to cull it back down to be more manageable.
2. How much you retweet
Most people treat retweeting as window dressing for their profile page. They see something they like or identify with and want to add it to their little garden of tweets.
In reality, far fewer people are seeing retweets on someone’s profile page than they’re seeing them thrown in amidst their following feed — and the person who retweeted it is hardly involved in how it’s seen.
Retweets hold value in getting more people to see your stuff, and as such, are a form of social currency. Not to get too machiavellian, but to people using Twitter to grow an audience, there’s a whole unspoken (and sometimes spoken) reciprocal social contract involved in retweeting, which leads to the biggest mistake I’ve seen in smaller accounts:
- You don’t retweet at all — You’re like the one-way friend who never calls to hang out and expects you to always be the one making an effort. Prospective followers know that you basically have nothing to offer them in their similar goals of growing their audience.
There’s a small chance you’re putting stuff out there that will get retweets regardless of any reciprocity, but even if that’s the case, when you’re just started out you’re only making things harder on yourself by not following the golden rule.
3. Your name
What’s in a name? Besides it being what people remember you as, when you’re the one choosing what it is, it can speak volumes.
- You use your brand or product as your Twitter name — I could probably write an entire post about personal vs. product branding on social media, but short of that, please trust me that if you’re just starting out, you don’t want your username or display name to be your company or product name. Use your real name or personal handle to make it easy for people to identify with you.
- Your handle is edgy, offensive, or self-deprecating — This might be great if your professional network or audience is disaffected preteens, but most people will get turned off by names that aren’t in some way personable.
4. Your profile pictures
Your profile and header image are the first things people look at when they check out your profile or hover over your name, so you want to make a good first impression. Picking the right profile and header pictures is too subjective to make too many suggestions, but there are a couple easy things to avoid.
- Your profile picture isn’t a face — Notice how every successful video on YouTube has a big expressive face on it? That’s not by accident. There’s a psychological attraction people have to seeing someone’s face. This works whether it’s an illustration or photo, so if even you’re shy you can still put up something facey.
- You don’t show off your work — If you’re an artist or creator of anything that can be shown off visually, you need to use your header image (and possibly profile image) as a mini portfolio. Show people why they should follow you at a glance.
- You change your profile picture — Most people don’t keep tabs on you as closely as you think they do, so if you drastically change your picture, expect a lot of your followers to totally lose track of who you are. Part of branding is consistency, so make sure your profile image is consistent or has clearly consistent content (as in, people can recognize you easily through different photos).
5. Your presence
While Twitter can be a professional network and marketing thingy, it’s still a social network at heart. If you don’t recognize the social aspect of it, you can quickly find yourself tweeting into the void.
- You don’t interact — Using Twitter solely as syndication of your content is like playing on hard mode. Reply to other people, like their tweets, and as stated, retweet their work to help them in the same way you’d like them to help you out.
- You don’t treat people like you’re with them in person — It’s really easy to be rude, dismissive, or crude online when you don’t think anyone is paying attention or keeping track. But if you talk about something or someone negatively on Twitter, there’s a good chance that someone involved will read your tweet. This is true beyond Twitter, but given the profile-oriented nature of Twitter, it’s even more inexcusable to be an asshole on it.
Recognize that people have feelings regardless of how detached they seem or how much lower or higher above you think they are. Similarly, the things people create represent investments of personal energy, time, passion, and ego, so take a second to think about how the creators of something might feel if they read your take on it. If not for the satisfaction of being a nice person, you should consider all this for your reputation, opportunities, and employability.
What else?
Let me know if I missed any other simple mistakes people make on Twitter (maybe I’m making them…). If you have a different perspective on any of my points, I’d love to hear your thoughts!
