Do you know these 10 dangers in the use of Twitter in business?

10 mistakes to avoid on Twitter

When used correctly, Twitter can improve your marketing, your business profile, and your operations. However, there is a danger that, because you are so new, you could make some of the following fundamental mistakes that nullify the usefulness of Twitter for your business.

1. Not setting up your profile with a proper bio and photo. If you don’t have them, other people tend to think you’re not really engaged with Twitter and might even be a spammer and unfollow or never follow in the first place.
2. Use hashtags for every topic you tweet about. It soon becomes boring for your followers and is meaningless.
3. Protect updates, which means no one can have conversations with you. Which if you are trying to use social media to improve your business has the opposite effect.
4. Ignore conversations with other people. Again, you are trying to improve your business through conversations with other people, ignoring all direct messages and @replies kills the conversation and people soon unfollow where they are not wanted.
5. Do not track if Twitter is driving traffic to your business. Because you need to see if your tweets are helping to drive traffic to your website or your business.
6. Never retweet. If you don’t tweet again, it shows that you’re not really paying much attention to the tweets you’re getting. As always there is something you can retweet that is useful to your own followers. And because the perception is that you’re using Twitter to spread your message rather than join the conversation, people will ignore your messages as well.
7. Chasing those who do not follow. People follow people whose tweets they think might be interesting, helpful, or both. If they find that your style, tweet rate, or usefulness is exactly what they wanted, they will unfollow you. Trying to win them back is an exercise in futility as there are plenty of others they can try and they may be more exactly who they want to follow anyway.
8. Don’t tweet full trivia like the weather, hello, or bye! It’s boring and clutters the timeline. Do too much and people will just stop following you.
9. Don’t make Twitter a tool to avoid work. Although Twitter can be a bit addictive, you must be disciplined in its use. Otherwise, you can spend time just browsing Tweets, following new people, and having conversations when there are other, higher-priority tasks you need to get done.
10. Forgetting that each Tweet stays “forever” on the Internet. Remember that on the Internet everything you say is stored and searchable. So if you say something libelous, sarcastic, or just plain wrong, it will stay there forever.

Of course, there are also other mistakes that you can make. However, if you avoid the above 10, you will have a much better chance of being forgiven if you make other mistakes.