I recently became active on Twitter. I usually tweet about startups, entrepreneurs and some good coding stuff. In my month or so of joining twitter, I have observed that it’s particularly difficult to have people follow you. In order for them to follow you, your tweets should be helpful to them.
Twitter: Power and responsibility
I have attended few social media branding talks where folks talked about creating a personal brand on twitter. Now with my own twitter handle, I started feeling about the power and responsibility that twitter endows you.
POWER: With a twitter handle, I could follow anybody, read their tweets and tweet to them. This part where I could tweet to any person is particularly useful for new businesses who want to create an online brand and gain followers.
Uncle Ben said in Spiderman – “With great power comes great responsibility”. And the same thing stands for your Twitter power as well.
RESPONSIBILTY: If you have twitter followers, you need to tweet content appropriate for followers. If you go haywire, then active twitter users would surely unfollow you. For example take the recent case of hashtag #ShamedInSydney which was being trended by Times Now. People got so infuriated (because Team India had performed above expectations in the World Cup) by this hashtag that they started trending #ShameOnTimesNow. This hashtag was trending number one in India for three consecutive days. Ultimately TimesNow had to delete all their tweets related with #ShamedInSydney. #ShamedInSydney was an ultimate PR disaster for TimesNow which led it to loose some of its followers. Businesses need to be wary of such PR disasters as they create a bad taste for consumers and bad image for businesses.
#Discover feature of Twitter
I feel that this is the most awesome feature of twitter. With this feature, you could read tweets of people you don’t follow, you can then follow new people, and you can spot your potential customers and tweet to them. The possibilities are endless. At this moment, I would like to share one of my tweet that got favorited 9 times in space of 10 minutes and the interesting part is, none of the favorites were by my followers. I think this indeed demonstrates the virality of twitter platform.
“To Get Traction, You Need To Create It : This Is How Successful Ones Solve The Chicken-Egg Problem” https://t.co/s9caibj7nz … #startups
— Vishal Jain (@j_vishal3991) April 2, 2015
Final Tidbits
In my just one month of twitter activity, I have been fortunate enough to gain some followers and follow interesting people. But I have seen that businesses don’t handle their twitter profile carefully, they don’t engage with followers, tweet meaningful content and annoy people. A one particular Business annoyed me so much that I had to mute them.
Last but not the least, fellow rodinhooders, I would love to hear your views and learn from you guys.
P.S.: I am no social media expert, these are my observations and views.
