Sometimes one of the most challenging elements of entering the world of Social Media is trying to wrap your head around the ‘rules’ of a particular community or medium.  Often the best thing to do, at first, is to listen to and observe the way in which a particular crowd interact in order to best guage how to enter the fold yourself.

Over the next few blog updates I’m going to be looking at a few “etiquette” tips for some of the main social media hangouts, with a view to helping users old and new to avoid falling foul of the crowd!

First up…

Twitter

• A common tactic to build followers is to follow someone, and then unfollow them shortly after they’ve followed you.  This is done so that the “Following” number is kept much smaller than the “Followers”.  Absolutely mad – would you rather build a number, or build relationships?  People are becoming more savvy to this now, and can even visit websites which tell them they’ve been unfollowed – so avoid this tactic like the plague.
• Constantly being in “sell, sell, sell”  mode – this simply will not work.  Twitter is great in that it enables people to filter out the rubbish they don’t want to see by unfollowing someone… that will be you if you can’t switch off the sales pitch
• Don’t ask for “Retweets” on every update you make.  If you’ve developed relationships with people they’ll happily retweet your posts whether you request it or not, from time to time – but constantly begging for them to do it will quickly see those relationships deteriorate.
• Some people have the RSS feed from their blog, or someone elses website, set up to update their Twitter – and in a lot of cases, that is ALL they do – often this is done out of sheer laziness, much like other forms of automation.  Don’t do it – people will catch on, get bored, and unfollow you.
• Don’t complain about EVERYTHING!  Twitter is a great way to make your dissatisfaction heard if you’ve had a bad experience – but if that negativity dominates the tone of everything your write, people will be put off.
• Remember its not a chatroom… this one may be controversial… if you spend all day, every day, talking to the same 2 or 3 people – anyone who follows you or them will soon get bored with seeing nothing but your private conversation, and will unfollow.  That is not to say, in any way, that you shouldn’t converse with people through Twitter – just be mindful enough to consider that, after a certain point, there may be a better way to hold your daily chats!

Hopefully this will prove useful or at least provide food for thought.  I’d love to hear any more suggestions for Twitter etiquette which you may have, or feedback on the points I’ve posted, so please do feel free to comment.