7 Deadly Twitter Sins

Contrary to many people’s beliefs, social media will amplify your reputation. Here are seven things that will make you look like a self-obsessed jerk on Twitter.

1. Paying one of those dubious online companies to get you more followers.

Unless you are Kanye West, Ashton Kutcher or dare I say, Justin Bieber, you will have to work to gain followers. If you want meaningful followers, you are going to need to tweet useful and valuable content to attract your designated audience.

2. Auto DMs

We get it, you are busy. We are all. But you don’t see the rest of us, using  DMs saying, “Thanks for the follow. Now check out my and such product website.” It’s faking an online persona, which in turn hurts your authentic brand.

3. Scheduling All Your Tweets

Scheduling all your tweets is simply inauthentic. It’s pretty easy to figure out, who is doing this. If you don’t reply to a comment from a scheduled tweet within a week or a month. Twitter is a very fast-paced network. If you aren’t “on” and monitoring it daily (not just scheduling all your tweets), people will smarten up, stop replying and start unfollowing your account.

If you obviously have to take a leave of absence, such as if you are going out of the country, just openly state it. Maybe, post a blog post about what you will be doing while you are unplugged.

4. No @ or RTs in Your Twitter Stream

The power of Twitter lies in the conversations you can have with others. If all you do is tweet out your blog posts and products, you are most likely not adding anything of value.

5. No Profile Photo

The egg isn’t that attractive. It tells me either two things. First, you are lazy and don’t care enough to change it to something that reflects you or your company. Or, that you have some kind of horrible facial deformity that would scare people away from following you.

6. Over-Exaggerating Your Profession, Influence, Etc.

Admit it, we’ve all over-embellished our accomplishments once in awhile. That’s not horrible if it only happens once or twice. I’m talking about the chronic over-exaggeration. The person who claims to be a Cough, Cough, social media expert, but only has 100 followers. Or, the person, who brags about the great work they do in a big Fortune 500 company, but neglect to mention that they  are actually just working in the mailroom. It’s not cool, and your scheme and lies will only hurt you and your personal brand.

7. Pretending To Be Someone You Are Not

I don’t understand why people create fake personas online. To me, it seems so time-consuming and confusing. What’s wrong with being you? You can’t fake authenticity.

Jessica Malnik works with B2B SaaS and professional service firms to build marketing moat that compound over time using her signature content framework. As both a strategist and executor, she helps clients develop strategic content marketing roadmaps, scale content production, and provide guidance on campaigns and individual pieces.
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