Do you fancy yourself a social media guru and communications expert? If so, you might want to make sure you are not using the following tactics because at best your audience is making fun of you, and at worst you are probably damaging your brand.
Tactic #1: Extreme use of hashtags. People use the hashtag symbol # before a relevant keyword or phrase in their tweet to categorize those tweets and help them show more easily in Twitter Search. They also use them in their bio description in order to increase the probability of their profile being found during a keyword search. However; best practices suggests not using more than 2 hashtags in your communication. Don’t believe it? Take a look at the following:
I used the tweet example above to drive home the point that the extreme use of hashtags is annoying. As you can see my message resonated; 17 retweets and 5 favorites over a very short period of time confirms that the extreme use of hashtags does indeed annoy your twitter audience.
The same line of thought applies to the extreme use of hashtags in your bio. In conclusion; hashtags are very useful, but too much of a good thing is just too much. So use some moderation.
Tactic #2: Sending automated “Thank you for following me” tweets and direct messages. I understand it seems like the polite thing to do. You want to send a “warm Welcome” to your new followers and acknowledge their engagement. Besides, you’re having trouble coming up with relevant, interesting and engaging content so why not fill up the twitter stream with mindless babble that proclaims your popularity by thanking every profile that follows you. The problem is that you don’t have the time and energy to thank all your new followers on a one-off basis so you’ve resorted to some type of automation application to do the work for you. As a result, everyone gets a thank you, including those pesky spam profiles.
As you can see, it’s not working; particularly if you are leveraging automation to get the job done. In truth, it’s just not coming across as relevant or sincere.
I’ll be the first to admit that this post is not backed by strict market research standards. No, I just quickly engaged my connections and learned what I needed to know. In this case, I’m going to watch the number of hashtags I’m using. And I’m not going to be thanking you for following me!
Thanks for this blog post, Alan. It was very useful. I do feel the burden of hashtags. You expressed it well.