Is This Your Twitter Avatar?
Twitter is supposed to be a social media network but lately I’ve noticed it’s less about communication and more about us marketing ourselves. I’m also beginning to notice long time Twitter users are dropping out of Twitter more frequently blaming their lack of interest on the “It’s All About Me” agenda. Could it be Twitter is losing it’s appeal because too many people aren’t striking the balance between selling and communicating? So congrats to you for making a fortune with your social media book but is selling your books and getting paid to speak at events your single agenda for social media now? You’ve changed since I’ve started following you.
Snobbery Rant Digression
Hell, I’ve met SEOs who will not follow people just to keep their follow to followers count at a certain ratio. And I remember once when a certain high profile SEO tweeted that if someone didn’t have at least 200 followers then he wouldn’t follow him, so I stopped following the SEO. And I’ve also noticed that many of the social media experts seem to be so lost in their own egos that they might be forgetting what social media is supposed to mean. I mean I’m not really sure if I’ve learned anything from a social media expert except for lessons in self importance and nepotism. Look at Me!
But the reality is that most of us use Twitter to reach a profit agenda, and certainly nothing wrong with that because that is what makes the world go around. But in trying to achieve this I think we are losing sight of what social media is and are more frequently using it as an all-about-me platform. So I wrote this Twitter snobbery blog post in fun, but also as a reminder that Twitter is a great social network but if we use it to purely market ourselves we risk removing the “social” and it will eventually become just another useless network.
You might be a Twitter snob if:
- You only follow and engage high profile people who speak at or attend the same conferences you do. Many SEOs and social media pros do this and it makes absolutely no sense.
- You limit the number of people you follow to maintain an impressive follows to followers ratio. For some reason many SEOs talk about this ratio as a measurement of social media importance which makes me think they just don’t get it.
- You usually only engage people in your immediate network but occasionally DM outsiders when asking for or marketing something. Actual social media pros attempt to engage everyone.
- Your agenda is to only Tweet about yourself or your business and never anything else. You think everyone wants to hear your story but you’ve actually become very boring.
- You decided to not follow someone based on his unappealing avatar. I’m totally ashamed to admit but I’ve done this. He just didn’t look very friendly.
- You only use Twitter to retweet high profile bloggers and never say anything about yourself. Yes this is Twitter snobbery and it’s annoying.
- You don’t follow regular folk who do not have a URL in their Twitter profile. I used to be guilty of this until I realized how engaging those non marketing people can be, and they could be your next customer.
- You simply don’t follow regular people.
- You only engage attractive women or only retweet the same woman eight times per day and ignore most others. This one sounds silly but one very popular high profile blogger does this to the point I do wonder about his motive.
- You follow people on Twitter to market your product then unfollow them when you’ve finished your marketing agenda. This makes you more than a Twitter snob, you’re a Twitter ass.
