Twitter No-No #1 (Shameless) Self-Promotion

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Twitter No-No #1: (Shameless) Personal Promotion By joe kneale

I currently follow 77 individuals on twitter. This number changes from time to time, of course, but I have found that if I follow much more than that I cannot access all of the information I would like to in the time I have alotted for twitter (low utility tweets get in the way). I could always devote more minutes, but my time is valuable just like anyone else’s! (opportunity costs of twitter, Tweetonomics pt 1)

So, what to think about individuals whose time is worth 5-10 times more than mine that follow 15-30 times more people than I do?

Clearly, they are using twitter as a mostly one-way “push” medium. Sure, they may respond to @replies or direct messages from other twitterites – and maybe they participate in #hashtaggable conferences, but they are demonstrating that they do not care about the tweets or thoughts of their hand selected follows. How? Because anyone who follows 2,550 people is just NOT spending much time digesting the information in their feed. How could they possibly afford to?

But, it is not a crime to use twitter for promotion so long as the creator is capable of creating content valuable enough to organically attract an audience. That said, when does one-way communication cross the “shameless” line?

Simply put, when it becomes SPAM. Self-promoters who follow individuals hoping that the action of following will catch attention are spammers (”name: your horny kitten — bio: check out my web cam”). Slightly more subtle and equally more insidious are self-promoters who rely on the social convention of “a follow for a follow” to build their audience (”he didn’t follow me back, he must be a twitter-snob”). The most shameless of the bunch are users who pay or scheme for followers (”twitter-train rocks!”). Spam wastes our time and destroys value.

The bottom line is simple; respect your audience by being transparent with them, you can’t fool anyone with a fake follow. Always remember; if you only intend to use twitter to receive little and push out lots your content had better be worthwhile. Speech might be free but audiences aren’t — spammers are born the minute self-promoters can’t get enough attention through valuable content and try to cheat.