I’m on Twitter, along with about 100 million other monthly users. I’m also a bit of a geek, so I tend to over-analyze things when I can. I love spreadsheets and reports and such, so I’ve been using Twitter Analytics daily. Well, at least reading my stats there.
Image courtesy of epublicist on Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0
Recently I noticed that a couple of my tweets had no views at all. None. Zero. That was disturbing. I know I’ve only got 248 followers, but I assumed someone would have read them, although I’m not sure what Twitter calls a “view.” I tend to read my Twitter feed using Hootsuite, not Twitter.com, so I’m not sure how or if that affects views.
At any rate, I’ve done some reading lately, including Hootsuite’s article on “9 Reasons Why You’re Not Getting More Twitter Followers,” and realized how many mistakes I’m making.
If I’m honest about it, I’d say too many of my tweets are non-positive. I tend to talk about stuff that’s important to me, and some of that involves what I perceive as injustices in the world. And while people need to hear about some of these things, so the problems can be fixed, no one wants a steady diet of “It’s bad,” in their social media feeds, so I need to work on that.
Another thing I’m bad about is follow-backs. I don’t automatically follow someone who follows me. But that led to something else that I perceive as a problem. While I follow 178 accounts, it seems like most of them are corporate accounts, not people. That leads to a lack of interaction, since many corporate or news accounts are often mostly one-way accounts, sharing lots of information, but rarely conversing with followers.
I think I’m going to try an experiment. For the next several weeks, I’m going to start following more people on social media, and maybe cut down on some of the non-personal accounts I follow. I’m also going to try and start actually interacting with my followers. That’s what social media is supposed to be: a conversation.
I’m not doing this just to build a legion of followers. I genuinely want to talk with people even though more and more I realize what an introvert I am. Go figure that one out.
4 Comments
I also highly recommend using lists to divide people into categories. I have like a “Newsworthy” list that I use for all those “corporate/ writing tips” accounts that aren’t really people I will talk to but might post links I want to Retweet. And I have a list of new people I’ve followed that I dont want to get lost in the feed. Plus a lit of people I talk to frequently! 😀
Oops did I just double post this same advice? I don’t know… too many blogs! haha. Anyhow, I’m following you onTwitter now! 😀
One thing I’ve already done is to create a list called “People,” which is made up of the non-corporate accounts I follow. It’s a fairly small list, too, which I don’t think is a good thing. We’ll see.