Liz King Events: Social Media Event Planning Specialists

If you've spent any length of time on Twitter, you'll notice that not everyone uses it for professional reasons. It can be really stressful to wade through thousands of updates about what people are doing and eating to find meaningful content. But, hopefully by now you've been able to find that there is a lot of great content on Twitter if you can find it. I hope that you've been able to make some meaningful relationships by honing in on the right group of people through tweet chats and through people that you follow. 

Many experts will agree that success on Twitter is not dependent on the number of followers you have or the number of people you follow. I've heard talk about follower ratios and what the ideal ratio should be, but that's not what I want to focus on today. Today, I would like to share with you my philosophy on the Twitter follow. For someone new to Twitter, followers are a big deal. They are spending a good amount of time tweeting to an audience of five or ten and they feel a little lost in the noise. To those of you feeling this way - I offer hope. I was there too. And while I'm no Ashton Kutcher, I've gained followers slowly over the course of the last year. Would I have wanted this progress to happen faster? Absolutely not and I'll tell you why.

Much like yesterday's list, today I want to summarize the things you shouldn't do on Twitter if you want to have a good following (quality, not quantity) and make the most of Twitter. While these are simple thoughts, they can be hard to follow if your focus is solely on marketing yourself.

1. DON'T use applications that let you auto-follow and auto-unfollow other people.
2. DON'T send more than 20% of your tweets about you and what you do. 
3. DON'T use all 140 characters. If you use all the characters, people will have a hard time retweeting you.
4. DON'T automatically send direct messages to everyone who follows you, unless you have something meaningful and unique to say to the follower. 
5. DON'T tweet about meaningless things. Personal updates once in a while are fine, but keep your tweets focused on something interesting to other people.
6. DON'T add hashtags to your tweets for the sake of it - use with discretion.
7. DON'T feel that you need to reply to EVERYONE who sends an @message. If you want to reply to someone, focus on the people who took the time to personally send you a direct message first.
8. DON'T forget that you are on Twitter to brand. Make sure your Twitter profile is filled out completely and links to your home base.
9. DON'T be offended if someone unfollows you. It's part of the process and people need to do what they need to do. 
10. DON'T get lost in the popularity battle. Focus on content, not follower ratios.

I did it! I waited until Day 20 to bring up Twitter. Many of you know that I LOVE to tweet so it's taken a lot for me to wait this long before bringing up Twitter and all of it's wonderful benefits to your personal brand. I meet people all the time who cringe at the mere mention of 140 characters because they've been burned by the "Eating big pancakes at IHOP with my grandma" tweets. But today, I want to encourage you to give it just one more chance. Today, I make my case for why you should bother with Twitter.