twitter mistakes

Are You Guilty Of These Five Twitter Mistakes?

August 1, 2014 by Marc Guberti 14 Comments

Twitter is growing, and its growth shows no signs of stopping. Even as it Twitter continues to grow, mistakes are still being made at a regular basis. Some of these mistakes make you look like a newbie while others hinder your growth and make you look like a robot. Out of all of the mistakes people make on Twitter, there are five mistakes that show up the most.

Not engaging with your followers. You need to engage with your followers to build strong connections. Your audience gets to know you better if you interact with them. If you do not engage with your followers, then some people will think you are a robot. Here are some ways to engage with your followers.
Not having a good avatar. If your bio picture is not a picture of you or your company’s logo, then you do not have a good avatar. Your avatar is how people see you on Twitter, so make that avatar something that people would be happy to see. If you are looking for an avatar, just take a good selfie of yourself with your phone and use that for your avatar.
Tweeting too much. Many people send out 10 tweets within 1 minute. That is too many tweets to send out in a short amount of time, and some people will get irritated to see the same person on their timeline 10 times in a row. That may result in some people in your audience unfollowing you.
Not tweeting enough. I always got confused when the blogger contradicted himself/herself, but this contradiction makes sense. People hear that tweeting too much results in unfollows, but that kind of tweeting refers to sending out too many tweets at once. You can schedule tweets throughout the day so your followers read your tweets at a comfortable rate. I send out one tweet every 20 minutes. Ever since I made the move, I have gotten more engagement and followers.
Not sharing enough of you the right way. “The right way” is in Italics for a reason. Many people promote themselves just for the sake of promoting themselves. Readers want value and won’t click on a link just because it’s your blog post. Your content needs to be the type of valuable content that your targeted audience wants to read. In addition, if your content is valuable for your targeted audience, they will want more of your content. In this case, you can tweet links to your blog posts all day long, and your followers will be grateful for the value.

Twitter mistakes are made too often. If you are making these mistakes, then you need to get them fixed as soon as possible. Are you guilty of these mistakes?

3 Things About Twitter You Are Mixing Up

July 19, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

Twitter is a bustling social network that can be very helpful for your business. Many business owners and entrepreneurs create Twitter accounts hoping to be successful right away following an easy method. These people quickly learn that success on Twitter is not linear. It involves twists and turns, getting lost, and finding your way. Some people hear about different methods about growing their Twitter presence but get those methods mixed up. These are the three common methods that people get mixed up.

Using too many hashtags. Twitter users learn that hashtags are good for SEO on Twitter, but that results in some users including too many hashtags in their tweets. Most of your tweets should only have 1 hashtag, and you should have no more than two hashtags in the same tweet. Including 10 hashtags in the same tweet will make that tweet harder to read. If someone finds it difficult to read your tweet, that person won’t bother to finish reading that tweet…even if it is under 140 characters.
Not tweeting about your blog enough. Remember that 80/20 rule where you only tweet about your blog 80% of the time? That rule is preventing your blog from getting more traffic. I decided to tweet about my blog 95% of the time (the only tweets without links to my blog posts are inspirational quotes). I get numerous messages every day about people being grateful for the content on this blog and for my tweets. The reason is that your followers do not care who wrote the content. They only care about the content’s value. If your blog posts are valuable, and your followers would enjoy reading them, you can share them on Twitter as many times as you want.
Not tweeting about your products. There are many people who believe Twitter users would be unlikely to buy a product if you tweet it out. These people believe that you need to get these people to visit your blog and then buy your product that way. However, if you are selling a product for under $20, you can tweet out that product and make sales straight from Twitter. Tweeting out discounts and having a product that your target audience would enjoy will also help boost your sales.

Twitter mistakes are easy to find, but some people who think they are not making any mistakes are getting some things mixed up instead. By not getting these three things mixed up, you will be able to get more engagement from your Twitter audience. In addition, this engagement will help you get more blog traffic and sales.

7 Ways To Tell Whether Someone Is A Newbie On Twitter

May 31, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There are obvious signs of a new driver. If the car in front of you makes a left turn with the right blinker on, stops and starts often, and is making bad turns, then you know the person behind the wheel is new to driving (I start the entire process this summer). There are also obvious signs that someone just started to use Twitter. These are seven of them:

The person does not have a lot of tweets. If someone has less than 1,000 tweets, then that person is definitely a newbie on Twitter. People with over 1,000 tweets, are not newbies.
The egg avatar. Some people have thousands of followers but still have the egg avatar. Those accounts are the exceptions, not the rule. If someone has the egg avatar, that person is probably new to Twitter. If someone has the egg avatar and has thousands of followers, then that account may be a spam account (this does not always happen, but it is common).
Statuses that do not flow. If you feel awkward reading most of someone’s statuses (awkward in the way that reading them sounds), then that person probably just joined Twitter. In the beginning, people experiment with tweets and have no idea what creates the perfect tweet.
A really bad follower to following ratio. An obvious sign of a new account is one with 100 followers that is following 1,987 people because that account currently cannot follow over 2,000 people. The people behind these accounts heard that following a lot of people to get follow backs is a great idea, but these people took it a bit too far.
These people only talk to celebrities. Celebrities almost never respond to other people’s tweets. If you sent a tweet to your favorite celebrity, then you know that I mean. Some people go on Twitter just to follow celebrities and hope that one day, their favorite celebrity will respond to one of their tweets. The people who are thriving on Twitter decided to go from talking to celebrities to talking with their own followers.
Asking for the shout out. With over 50 million followers on Twitter, Katy Perry will not be asking for a shout out anytime soon. If you are a part of the large majority, you don’t have 50 million followers. In fact, the majority of Twitter users have under 1,000 followers. These people ask for shout outs because they think that if someone with 100,000 followers gave them a shout out and they only gained 1% of those followers, that person would gain 1,000 followers. The problem is that it never happens that way. Less than 10% of those 100,000 followers will see the tweet. Then, less than 10% of those people will read the entire tweet. Then, less than 5% of the people will follow the account. Mathematically, that would still be 50 followers, but that won’t happen. Asking for and getting shout outs is the most overrated way to get more followers. Twitter users who have been tweeting for a while know that this is true.
Two tweets to relay 1 message. Some newbies will need more than 140 characters to relay their message. Instead of using less characters to relay the message, some newbies will send out the first tweet and then send out a second tweet which is a continuation for the first tweet. While continuations work very effectively in reality TV shows, they do not work well with tweets.

Those are the seven ways to tell whether someone is a newbie on Twitter or not. What are your thoughts on the list? Is there another method you use to tell whether someone is a newbie or not? Please share your thoughts and methods below.

Why Having A Private Twitter Account Hurts A Lot

January 31, 2014 by Marc Guberti Leave a Comment

There is a feature on Twitter that some people use to make their accounts private. Other people probably forgot people make their Twitter accounts private. It is not a popular practice, but the people with private accounts are getting hurt by a lot.

The first and biggest problem is that a request needs to be sent to someone before you can follow them. Clicking the Follow button is not enough to see the person’s tweets on your timeline. By the time someone with a private account approves a request, that person may have forgotten about the private account already. Having to send a request discourages people from clicking the follow button.

The second problem is that people often wondering why a private account needs to be private. It’s doubtful that information about nuclear weapons is being exchanged by the private accounts on Twitter. There are some private accounts that send out good tweets, but many of them send out tweets that they don’t want particular people to read. Even if you are a private account that tweets like any public account, you’re in the category of hiding something from the masses.

The third problem is that people looking at a private profile do not have strong motives towards following that person. The only motives someone has towards following a private account is the username, bio, and avatar. There are no tweets that will help out towards the decision of whether or not to click the follow button.

There will still be some people who will keep their accounts private, but do so at your risk. Private accounts may allow you to keep your tweets a secret from the public, but they don’t lead to an accumulation of followers.

The 5 Most Common Twitter Mistakes

January 25, 2014 by Marc Guberti 15 Comments

Twitter has helped transform numerous businesses, and there are more businesses using Twitter in order to get the transformation. However, many people and businesses are making these 5 common mistakes on Twitter. If you want to know if your account is good or needs to have some changes, read this entire blog post. These are the 5 most common mistakes people make on Twitter:

Having a bad bio. Many people know that not having a bio is a big mistake on Twitter, and that’s why few Twitter accounts don’t have bios. However, not everyone writes a good bio. These are some ways to write a higher quality bio with those 160 characters.
Not tweeting about your blog enough. The rule everyone has been led to believe is that 20% of your tweets should be about your blog while the other 80% should be about other things. Many people with thousands of followers (and some of these people have over 100,000 followers) make this mistake. I made this mistake until I reached 20,000 followers. I decided to tweet about my blog for most of the day. The result was a dramatic increase in traffic. I did not lose followers when I tweeted about my blog. In fact, I gained more followers when I tweeted about my blog. Twitter is all about building awareness for a blog or product while meeting other people. The more you tweet about your blog, the more awareness you are building.
Not interacting with your followers. HootSuite and other tweet scheduling tools are incredible. You don’t have to be on Twitter every hour in order to tweet every hour. There are people who use these tweet scheduling tools and forget to login to their Twitter account. Followers with questions don’t get answered. That’s a bad move, and all you have to do to avoid that is to check Twitter three times a day and reply to your followers when they want to talk with you or have a question.
Not following back. Too many people make this mistake. Every newbie at one point thinks that they are going to be the next verified person with 100,000 followers while only following 10 people. That’s what I thought, but when that didn’t happen, I decided to follow people. Following others is an essential way to get more people to follow you back and hear about you.
Not tweeting enough. Many people make the mistake of only tweeting a few times throughout the day. I define too few as tweeting 5 times in the day. In order to get more attention, you need to be tweeting more often. When you tweet more often, you should also tweet consistently. I consistently tweet once every hour (I’ll eventually bring up the rate to one tweet every half an hour). The more I tweet, the more followers and blog traffic I get.

By avoiding these 5 common mistakes, you will be able to get more out of Twitter. By consistently avoiding these mistakes and tweeting along the way, you will be able to transform your business with Twitter.