Why you're not getting Twitter followers (and why you should care)

Via SocialMediaToday.com, Paul Sutton lists 10 Reasons You’re Not Getting Followers on Twitter. Excerpt:

Twitter thrives on the relationship between you and your followers. And yet many small businesses struggle to gain a following and end up abandoning their profiles due to fundamental errors in the way they manage them. 

This often boils down to a lack of understanding of Twitter as a social channel and an inability or unwillingness to invest the time to learn. But the secret to success is simple: put yourself in your followers’ shoes and consider what you’re adding to their lives. 

There are some common mistakes that I see again and again on Twitter, and encountering one or more of these on a profile significantly decreases the chances of me following and/or increases the chances of me unfollowing or blocking.

Twitter tells me I've tweeted over 8,000 times, but I'm still pretty hazy about it; it's just part of posting a blog item, especially on my blog H5N1. That's a kind of clipping service about infectious diseases and the politics of public health. For the last three months, I've mostly been covering Haiti's cholera outbreak, and I've found several overlapping Twitter communities doing the same thing. 

So I've found Twitter a pretty good source of news, and that's what drives me to follow one person rather than another. A good correspondent, tweeting on the ground in Haiti, will find me a loyal follower.

I assume (perhaps mistakenly) that my followers are also interested in infectious diseases and public-health politics, and are using me to get quick links to breaking news. So I don't feel obliged to follow most of my followers.

As for the "ideal Twitter profile" that Paul Sutton recommends in #6, I don't come anywhere near it. Sometimes I'll re-tweet, but I'd rather pick up a tweeted link, post a blog item about it, and then tweet to my own followers plus those following hashtags like #cholera and #haiti and #babydoc.

Following can have drawbacks. I follow a number of Canadian journalists who are a bit over-smitten with tweeting and re-tweeting. Some of them have thumbs of steel and post nonstop tweets to one another. (From this they make a living?) This obliges me to scroll past long giggle-parties to find something I can use. Yes, I can always unfollow, but then I might miss the occasional scrap of real political gossip.

I suspect that we're dealing with Twitter as we dealt with blogging circa 2002: A kind of neat tool for various forms of self-publishing, but with its best days yet to come. If you have thoughts on where Twitter might go from here, or how you're using it in your own webwriting, I'd love to hear about it.

Comments

[Dynamic Websolutions]

Twitter, like all forms of social media, is all about how you use it. I agree with you, I primarily use it for news updates-which often happen on Twitter before they hit anywhere else- and I use it for social purposes. That said, I've stumbled into more than one project just because I'm on Twitter and people know who I am. Probably the most common question I get from my clients is: "Should I use Twitter?" Since the Search Engines have started paying more attention to social streams, The ability to push out blogs and other site information is there, and the opportunity to connect with others and become part of the community is there, I tend to think it's a no-brainer for most business owners.
seo richmond

[slavoie]

Yah Sutton is right about businesses that don't get it and they do no invest into. Same thing in real life, you do business development and reach out to people, you create relationship. Twitter isn't different, it just faster an easier.

I'm also blogging from time to time, mostly on Web Strategy, thanks.
Samuel - Web Strategy

[SEOVabMedia]

Google and Bing, two of the top three search engines, have both confirmed that they are using Twitter and Facebook as factors in ranking websites. This means that every time a link gets shared on Twitter or Facebook it gets counted for the search engine ranking.

Interactive Response: Just like individuals posting your links grow your website’s optimization for the search engines, the deeper part of that should help it as well. We are talking click-thrus, Re-Tweets, and possibly even likes on Facebook. The concept of interactive response would also consider that search engines might be looking to remove company bias. In short, it’s possible that a link of a company’s site shared by an individual would rank higher than that same link shared by the company itself. Interactive response is completely dependent on the content published and the response of followers. Companies should make sure that they are posting items relevant to their company as well as to their audience. This is the easy, obvious, way to gain an interactive response.