1. Don’t Expect Something for Nothing
Keep the Sales Pitches to a Minimum: Look at it from the aspect of the consumer/guest. Everyone is on every network selling. No one cares.
If you were scoping around twitter for people to follow, would you follow a company, no matter who, or what kind, that all they posted were sales pitches?
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Now reverse that thought. If you were a customer, would you follow yourself on twitter? There is nothing wrong with some sales, but try to keep the ratios to at least 6 regular tweets to one “pitch”.
If you are going to invest the few minutes a day, or week, to twitter, what is the difference between posting a recipe link or a photo or a comment to someone else, or posting a sales pitch? Difference is more people will follow a non pitchy tweeter.
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2. Check Your Followers
Not everyone is worth following back, yes there are sales pitchers, scammers, trolls and bots out there, but there is an enormous amount of REAL people and businesses out there.
Everyone and anyone is a potential customer (no matter where they are) or they know someone who could be a potential customer.
If you are going to really “use” twitter, you need to check who’s following and at least do a little engagement, either by DM or public tweet. If you don’t follow them back, odds are literally 1 in 100 that they will not keep following you,
The bots etc. drop off after a space of time automatically, the real ones LEAVE! i.e. a potential customer just dropped into your parlor (says the spider to the fly) and you let them go!
Say I’m a potential customer and I just followed you, you ignored me so why should I give you my business?
3.Be Courteous with Your DMs (Direct Messages)
Asking someone to like you on Facebook or pitching them with a sales message is the biggest turnoff in the world to a new follower. Please read: Inns and the Art of the DM (direct message) for my take on Direct Messages http://chefforfeng.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/inns-and-the-art-of-the-dm-direct-message/
Ask yourself, WHY should someone like your business on Facebook? They don’t know you, they don’t necessarily know your company or business.
If you start a conversation with me, I might go check you out some more, and because you’re non pitchy and it looks like a nice place to stay, shop or use the services of, THEN I might fan your page.
Ask yourself. If you lived in Germany and a car dealership in Georgia, USA connected with you, and the first point of contact you get from them is, Find us on Facebook. Why should you? Again turn it around, a DM pitch like that is one of the most impersonal things you can send someone.
Do you know what that tells the potential customer (me as an example)? You don’t give a rats tuckus about me, you just want my business. I can read the paper, watch TV, or listen to the radio to get pitched to. Maybe I have a question, a concern?
As an example of this, we used two Bed and Breakfast associations on twitter as a test of this, new followers (real people) were put on two lists to keep track of them.
Every other day new followers were sent either “Hello thanks for following us, if you are ever in XXXXX, we hope you enjoy it up here”, or on alternate days the spam pitch, “Find us on Facebook at XXXXX and check out our inns at XXXXX”
At the end of 3 months, we used Friend or Follow http://friendorfollow.com/ to check followers/fans/friends as well as checked our website statistics for the web pages listed in the twitter bios.
Results?
The amount of followers spammed with a find us on facebook DM unfollowed us at the rate of more then 80%. The ones that were sent the nice message, only had a 2% unfollow rate.
Does this tell you anything? This holds true for any type of business using twitter, from massage therapists to car dealers.
In addition, the days we sent the nice (non spammy) message to people, had a 34% higher click through rate from our twitter profiles to the websites. The spammy message had less then 1%.
Again does this tell you anything?
It only takes a second to be real person.
