Guess what? Nobody’s reading your Words of Wisdom on Twitter.
Actually, it’s possible that many people are reading what you write, but if research from Sysomos is to be believed, 71% of the time people Tweet, absolutely nobody responds.
This dovetails with a couple of things I’ve written about before: your follower count on Twitter is pretty much meaningless, and unless you have a reason to tweet, you shouldn’t bother.
The question, though, remains: how should your business use social networking?
First, have the accounts. Brand them if you can; we use Virtual VIP for our Twitter account, and you can find me on Facebook under my surname. Follow (err . . . make friends . . . umm . . . networking socially with. . .) people in your business, as well as people you’d like to be doing business with.
Second: speak only when you have something to say. Forget the joke about what you had for breakfast getting into your Twitter Stream; I mean it: speak, but only when you have something worth hearing. If the people who follow you don’t care about your words they won’t repeat them (the point of the Sysomos research). But worse, they’ll stop following you. Follower count may not matter, but ticking off people you’re trying to be friendly with by running off at the mouth is just not a good idea.
Finally, be consistent. In Social Networking, your voice words need to sound the way your followers come to expect. Run off in a strange direction, and you’ll be viewed as strange. Unless that’s your goal, it’s very, very bad.
I sure do hope that this gets retweeted. Or at least I hope I can improve on the research and get one out of three of my tweets posted somewhere!
