Sorry Brands, you’re losing twitter followers due to ….

You’re unintentionally asking your followers to GO 

Dear Brand on Twitter,

This is not a post about “How to get unlimited RTs” or “How to win followers on twitter” but it is about How you are losing existing followers by misusing the equation of Retweet vs Favorite.

First of all consider asking these questions to yourself

1. Why someone follows you?

Hint — They think your tweets will add value to their interests about your product/service/industry

2. What are you doing to keep them following you?

Hint — You’re tweeting, interacting and answering in order to make sure your followers get what they thought they will get by following you.

3. Why someone hit unfollow?

Hint — Well, You’re NOT tweeting, interacting and answering in order to make sure your followers get what they thought they will get by following you.

4. If #3 is true then where is the problem?

Hint — You’re a RT spammer. You’re misusing Retweet vs Favorite

What the hell is RT Spam

When you retweet aggressively and send a flood of tweets by unknown (who cares) to your existing followers’ timeline,which irritates them because whole of their timeline is full of random crap they never wanted to see.

How to stop doing this -

a) We all understand that when you get a mention by happy user you want to thank themfor that and you want to tell all your followers that people love you, Okay but problem starts when you RT many of those mentions within a couple of minutes.

Use favorite or @reply feature to thank them, however favorite was supposed to use as a tweetmarking tool to check/read them at a later point of time but considering that you’re a brand you don’t need to book mark a tweet about some ticket to followup later so using it to thank and mark good mentions makes sense. Use @reply when your social media team is not so busy or overwhelmed with the original good mention.

b) This one is most irritating — Never-ever-ever RT like a pampering nut when people are tweeting in your hashtag or contest, you are too excited about getting new followers and a trending campaign BUT your hashtag + RT is becoming a RT+Spam for your existing followers. You can lose a good twitter follower (with heavy numbers of followers) for few people who just joined you maybe for that ‘free gift’ only. Start your tweet with @USERNAMEand reply with your comments. Feeling lazy? Hit ‘favorite’ to as many tweets you like.

I recently observed this trend of RT SPAM causing a couple of well known mobile brands who lost a couple of well known journalists and more good followers. Loss is much bigger in impact on branding because influencing followers with good number of followers themselves.

Interacting with audience on twitter is important, use above suggestions or find another better way to interact but please say No to this RT-SPAM.

With love and wishes,

Your Ex-Follower

Twitter — Say Hi

PS. First published here, Please hit recommend if you like to share this with other good people on medium.

Picture c/o — Flickr