The Clean and Green Club

Wrapping up our three-part series on Twitter. First, we looked at the advantages of Twitter for marketers, then last month, how to tweet for maximum benefit. We’ll finish out by discussing how not to be a jerk on Twitter.

My title is a little bit pushy, in that for some people, Twitter is exactly these things—but they have few human followers (robots don’t count) and no influence; it would have been more accurate to say, How Not to Use Twitter. But I didn’t think about that when I lined out the topic titles in March.

Remember the key principle: Twitter is only worth doing if you create a tweet stream that people want to read. Otherwise, there’s no point. Every person who follows you makes a decision whether to follow you. If they’re using a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite, they also decide whether to place you in a most-favored column of people they pay close attention to you. In my case, I am following 5823 people as of May 12, when I’m writing this. But really, I’m paying attention to about 100 in my “must follow” column. So here are some pointers on what not to tweet:

1. An endless barrage of self-promotion. If more than 50 percent of your tweets are promoting your products and services, you’ll lose followers fast. I strive for a ratio of one self-promotional tweet to 10 other tweets.

2. Continuous Amazon (or other) affiliate links. I don’t understand these people at all. Their entire stream is nothing but affiliate links, and the products usually have nothing to do with each other. I see a lot of these pages because my Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green book is a popular product to feature, and I do click through to the profile every time someone mentions my book or me. The most recent person to list my book this way has made 22,288 tweets (probably all automated), has 421 followers, and is following 486 people. Of those 421, I’ll guess that 400 are from people who automatically follow back. In short, no one is reading, the account is not operated by a human, and affiliate commissions are probably near zero. Why bother?

3. Daily minutiae. If you tweet about what you had for breakfast, or that you’ve just brushed your teeth, you’d better do it in a way that’s funny or interesting. and keep it to maybe one post in 50. This is one of several reasons I don’t do Foresquare, which tweets your location with alarming frequency. (Not inviting burglars to my house is another reason.) Don’t bore people into shutting you out.

4. Lists and lists of people to follow. Again, boring! I do one Follow Friday (hashtag #ff) and one #ecomonday a week, and I publicly thank people who list me as someone to follow. It’s a very small part of my stream.

5. Spam. Duh! It doesn’t work in social media any better than it works with e-mail. Sending the same URL to a lot of people you don’t know, or direct-messaging a URL labeled as a picture of me when it’s not is just plain stupid. In TweetDeck, I can block and report a spammer in exactly two clicks, and I will do so unless I think the sender was hacked.Sometimes I’ll publicly shame them first. (And because I don’t automatically follow back, I am not plagued with direct-message spam. I get one or two a month, usually when someone was hacked.)

Two final bits of advice: Get five or ten juicy, high-quality tweets up on your profile page, along with a picture and something useful in the bio box, before you start looking for followers. And stay away from all the robot game-the-system approaches to building a followers list. You want real people who influence others to be following you because they love your content, not a bunch of robots following back in.

If you’d like me to consider following you, I might or might not if you have an interesting screen name. But I will definitely visit your profile (maybe not right away—be patient) if you engage with me. So send me an @shelhorowitz message that tells me something you found useful or helpful about this series (hint: if the @shelhorowitz is not the very beginning of the tweet, more people will see it). If I like what I see on your profile, I will follow back.