Twitter: Are You Talking to an Empty Room?

Are you noticing that your Twitter following isn’t as engaged/responsive as you’d like? Does it feel like you’re talking to an empty room? Twitter is gaining massive popularity and many new users are operating under a few incorrect notions, or assumptions that may be affecting their effectiveness in this relatively picky digital landscape. It’s time to set the record straight: if your Twitter followers aren’t talking to you it may be because your tweets are irrelevant, robotic, or infrequent.

Irrelevant: No one cares about what you ate for breakfast

One of the biggest misconceptions about Twitter is that we all tweet what we ate for breakfast and that we’re all very interested in the random minutiae of each others’ lives. While, some randomness IS interesting and engaging, generally speaking… no one cares!

Robotic: You’re the mayor of McDonalds

“Autotweets” or tweets that go out automatically because of another action you’ve taken (posted a blog, checked in using Foursquare, updated your Facebook status, etc.) are both a blessing and a curse in the Twitter world. It IS important to tweet frequently, however, if all your tweets are automatically tweeted it gives the impression that you’re never actually tweeting or talking to people. Why would I want to talk to a robot? I don’t.

Infrequent: Are you even tweeting?

How often do you post? Twitter is face paced (much more so than Facebook). If you’re an infrequent tweeter, who rarely takes time to tweet, your tweets are probably going to be buried pretty quickly in the stream. If they don’t see your avatar often, they may not care as much to carefully read your tweets.

Irrelevant: I followed you because you like X, but I’ve discovered you only ever tweet about Y (I’m minutes away from unfollowing you!)

Are your tweets all over the map in terms of content? If you tweet about your daily life, work, social media, and your various hobbies, its possible that your followers aren’t interested in a majority of your tweets. People generally follow other tweeters because they believe that person is going to discuss a topic that they’re interested in. If you’re not talking about my interests, I’m not engaged, period. Further, once I realize you’re not talking about my interests, I’m probably going to unfollow you.

Robotic: Your followers are profit seeking, scum-sucking, weasels – Sorry!

Ok, to be fair, this one probably isn’t your fault. Somehow, you’ve attracted bots, and shady businesses that are only on Twitter to get something from you. They are following you because they think at some point you’re going to follow them back, or you’ll take their survey, OR your tweets will somehow benefit them. Sorry. Sometimes even the nicest tweeters get shady followers.

Are YOU talking to others?

The best way to create engaged followers is to engage them! Strike up conversations, ask questions, respond to tweets, reply and retweet with comments. When you take the time to talk to others, they notice, and are more likely to talk back! It’s as simple as that.