Politeness is the Enemy of Twitter Marketing

I know what you’re probably thinking, and I’m not telling you to start being rude to your twitter following. But, I’m not exaggerating when I say that professional politeness gets in the way of successful marketing on twitter.

Think of what happens when you follow someone new for the first time. They follow you back, thank you for following them, and politely say how glad they are to meet you online. They may even throw in an exclamation point or two.

This might seem all fine and good, but you can be sure that they won’t remember who you are two minutes from now. You’ve both made polite twitter conversation, but no one made any connection. There are so many people on twitter that it’s impossible to have a deep meaningful relationship with all of them, but superficial followers aren’t going to spread your content and tell everyone how great of a twitter networker you are.

It’s your job as a marketer to get past twitter politeness to make real connections and build raving fans.

Here are a few tips to help you get noticed (and make a memorable impression):

First and foremost, tweet interesting stuff.

Nothing will get you unfollowed faster than tweeting useless garbage. Try to give your twitter feed some focus: what do your customers want to hear about. If you’re a business owner, you’re an expert in something: use that to your advantage.

Always provide your customers with something that they can’t get from anywhere else. While you’re spouting off this brilliant knowledge, your brand is coming across your customer’s feed and you are building a reputation for yourself as an industry leader.

This is important: when you’re on twitter for long enough, you get to know who really knows their stuff. Your most savvy customers will use this to decide if they want to hire you.

Tweet a lot, but you don’t have to write everything yourself

My main point of advice is to tweet at least once a day. Twitter messages don’t get saved, so if someone isn’t logged into twitter right when a tweet of yours is posted they probably won’t see it.  So don’t expect that anyone has read every tweet that you’ve published. If you want to get people’s attention, you need to post a lot.

If you don’t have something to say, find something interesting that someone else has written. The internet has an amazing amount of free content that you can share with your customers. Your customers aren’t reading about what goes on in your industry, but you are. If you find something interesting that someone else wrote, share a link in a tweet.

Most of your customers won’t even realize that you didn’t write the content yourself (even if the article isn’t on your website).

Personalize, personalize, personalize.

The best way to break through the politeness is to find and remember your followers real first names. Mention them in tweets, offer them relavent links and advice whenever possible, and give them some personal attention.

This is a lot of work to do on a large scale, but personal attention is what converts a passive follower to a twitter evangelist for your brand.

Personal attention is time-consuming, so pick big influencers.

Not every twitter follower is created equal. You want to get people on your side who have large influence on the internet. These people will amplify your message if you can get them on your side.

Klout is a website that I use to judge the influence of people on twitter. Klout gives a score from 1 to 100 based on the amount of influence a particular tweeter has. The higher the score, the higher the “engaged audience” they have.

Try and target people with a moderate (40-60) klout score: they will be influential enough, but they won’t be so jaded by fame that they aren’t open to making new connections.

No matter what, be real.

Social media is all about authenticity. Gone are the days where companies can completely control all of their marketing channels: today’s customer wants to know the company behind the brand.

So let them! Let your personality and company culture shine through in your twitter account. Once you get past the initial twitter politeness, you will have made a meaningful (and profitable) connection.

How do you get past “twitter politeness?”

Leave a comment below sharing your strategies for making connections on twitter.