It’s been a while since I had a good old rant on my blog, but I think that after cleaning up my Twitter list, it was time to get something off my chest.
What is your drive when using these social media sites? Getting huge numbers of people to follow your automated tweets, hoping that at the point you want something from them you can send something out and get an answer or indeed input from the people that you simply have not been interacting with?
...or…
Do you actually interact with the followers that you have and invest time and energies into their businesses, lives and beliefs?
Some people are not going to like what I have to say here but after using an automated system for a short period for time for my tweeting through Twitter, I truly believe that many of these systems of auto tweets are simply systems that put up barriers between you and your ‘followers’ and they also do not represent you as who you say you are.
If you are saying that you are a social media guru and all you do is pre-load a twitter machine with 100’s of quotes and links back to your system where we can ‘make $1,000’s of dollars each week’ - what is that doing other than a machine churning out your messages? Are you having relationship with those that ‘follow’ you or are you just delivering messages and ushering them to your site to sign up for a free ‘7 day programme’ or to purchase and e-book for only $5?
If you say that you are a business expert, coach or mentor, how can you mentor someone by just delivering messages on mass, blueprinting everyone with the same brush? As a business coach or mentor, surely your training [presuming you had some] should have pointed out that the methodologies and models you have, don’t always work with everyone. Every business man or woman is different and your automated tweets are not going to do anything but hit the mark some of the time and be irrelevant the rest of the time.
I must point out at this stage, I only choose these two profiles of Twitter users because of the two individuals who posted 6 comments every hour from thier auto-tweet-bots, spamming up my tweetdeck and to be honest - I hardly read a single thing that they wrote. Pointless!
I believe that the true key to success on these ‘new media’ sites [I say that loosely as they have been around for a while now - but business has only really jumped on the bandwagon recently] is to focus on building relationships and giving of yourself and your expertise to the followers who have chosen to follow you for one reason or another.
Now we all have logged into traffic system websites and seen how there could possibly be ways to generate more traffic to our sites through social media and the way that they auto follow people for you. Is this a wise move? If you don’t check who these people are that you are auto following to build you numbers up, how do you know that they are not damaging your reputation?
Upon cleaning up my list I found at least three people who followed me, I auto followed them, then I discovered that they were actually promoting adult entertainment websites. As a committed Christian and someone who is followed by many other Christians, what if they were to look through my list to see who I was following? What would that say about me?
All in all I believe that there is a place form many of the automated systems and also many occasions when they should be avoided or used in different ways.
Granted what you are putting out there in the Twitterverse may not be classified as SPAM but what is the point if you are not having interaction with your followers? If you are too busy to write something yourself and schedule in time to tweet, what does that say about the time and energies that you want to put into other people?
Relationships people... not auto spews from your bots and auto systems with no follow up or ‘manual’ twittering!
