One size does not fit all!

I’ve touched on this before in previous blogs, but I’m continually baffled by the need to use auto DM’s for new followers. The same message to every new follower can never work, surely? Or is it just me that gets a little ‘upset’ with them?!

Today I’ve had a few and I just don’t get it – one of them was even offering me a service I provide my clients! Would they go a face to face network meeting and say that to me? I doubt it! So why on Twitter?

For me Twitter is and always will be a 24/7 networking meeting; every follow, every conversation, every auto tweet is me demonstrating my business and what I do - obviously with a little fun thrown in, I’m not a robot after all ;) But it’s absolutely no different to how I would behave at a network meeting.

The one size fits all responders are the equivalent of cold calling and I’m not a fan of that either! Every new follower has the potential either to directly or indirectly be a new client/customer/contact – don’t take that for granted and treat everyone the same; take a few minutes to read tweets and bio’s, just the way you hope people will do for you - it could be the making of your business!

Re-tweet the chicken or the egg?!

We all know how much I love Twitter, it’s well documented! During the last week though I’ve had some really interesting conversations with people about how you measure results when using it.

This then got me thinking, when trying to grow your Twitter presence which is more important, re-tweets or followers? For me it’s a bit like the age old question, which came first; the chicken or the egg?!

Of course followers are important as you’ve got to have people to interact with, but if you’ve got 300 followers who re-tweet for you regularly, your message will more than likely reach more people than if you had 3000 followers who never re-tweet for you. The upside of lots of re-tweets is you could get more followers; I know for me I generally find new people to follow from looking at accounts that come into my stream from re-tweets.

You could however then flip that all on its head and say you need more followers to have a wider audience of people that could re-tweet for you.

But, then I suppose at the end of the day it all comes down to interaction – the keystone of Twitter!  If you’re not interacting with people and engaging them, neither followers nor re-tweets will help get your message out there or get you results!