My Twitter Do’s and Don’ts

I’m fairly new to the Twitter world but have been there long enough to develop a list of rules for myself. I realize my list is probably different than your list, but mine comes from the experiences and interactions I’ve had so far. 

Quite frankly, the primary purpose I’m using Twitter is to promote the items I’m selling in my Zibbet and Etsy shops.  While I realize that most of the people with whom I’m interacting on Twitter are using it for the same purpose and are not my target buyers, this 2013 Rank Correlation Study from Searchmetrics shows the importance of using Twitter for better positioning your website in Google search results.  To quote from the white paper, “well-ranked URLs have many shares, likes, comments, plus ones and tweets.”

So, my list of rules has developed with that mindset and the realization that I don’t just want followers, I want quality followers.  It seems that for every DO on my list, there is a DON’T.

       1)  DO tweet several of my items throughout the day.

    DON’T tweet them all at once or continually.

        2)  DO follow those who have the courtesy to follow you.

    DON’T follow everyone – take a look at the profile and make sure the person is not a spammer or tweets content that is offensive to you and/or others.

        3)  DO retweet those who retweet you.

    DON’T retweet those who very obviously schedule their tweets in advance and never log on to Twitter again.

         4)  DO promote people and venues whose success is tied to your success.

    DON’T promote people who engage in controversy or drama.

I’ve looked into services which allow you to set up automatic tweets, but I haven’t been able to convince myself that it would be a good idea for me to use one.  I’ve seen too many people on Twitter bombard others with the same tweets over and over all day long – and I know they’re using a service.  In addition, they never bother to retweet the tweets of anyone else.  I will not continue to follow someone who does that.

I also don’t continue to follow people who, while they constantly talk about promoting a particular selling venue, never follow you even though you have followed them and retweeted their tweets and you are tweeting from the venue they talk about promoting.  And if they have followed you, they may unfollow you even though the majority of what you’re tweeting promotes that particular venue.  These folks tend to be very insular.  They usually promote only a select few from one venue.  But I have found that most of the promoting of my items from one venue comes from people on other venues.  And I’m going to return the favor even if I don’t list on those venues or I don’t like the venue.  Not liking the venue has nothing to do with supporting the sellers who have supported me on Twitter.

And then there are the people who seem to thrive on controversy and drama.  I stay as far away from them as I can, even going so far as to block them so I don’t see their tweets when I’m searching for a particular term or venue.  I do not want my business associated with their drama. 

There are some great people to follow on Twitter, and I've very much appreciated those who take the time to promote others as much as themselves.  Even though I don't say thank you very much, I hope you know that I am thankful every time I retweet one of your posts.