I have had several Twitter accounts over the years, and I’ve observed a lot of behaviors that made me raise an eyebrow. Like, those who robo post their book fifty times a day or tag people out of the blue with an advertisement or send a link to their product without ever establishing a relationship first.
I often wonder, can they not see how that looks from the other point of view? Do they not see how they themselves react or don’t react when this annoying behavior is done to them?
The number one rule in sales and it goes for marketing as well, is to establish trust.
But the behavior that really baffles me is the ‘follow to unfollow’ crowd. And there’s a lot of them. These are the people that follow you and then a week later you realize they unfollowed you. They do this over and over to people to build a following. They think they are building a platform with this method, however, their platform is going to be shaky and eventual crumble. Why? Because in branding you must establish trust. How do you do that? Build a trustworthy relationship.
Why would I want to buy a book, music or service through someone that failed to prove to me that what they are offering is worth my time? And how can I trust that person when they went and pulled a sneaky move to make themselves look like they have a big following? When you ‘follow to unfollow’, it makes you look desperate, your product/service weak and most of all, it makes you look untrustworthy.
Relationship building can be very rewarding on a personal and professional level…
In the beginning of my writing career, because I came from the perspective of building trust through relationships, I gained about 30 wonderful friends via Facebook. I had no intention of becoming close friends with them it just happened organically. And not only did they help me spread the word about my books, but I got something even more important out of the deal, good friends.
I now realize I have made a big mistake with my Twitter platform though. So don’t do what I did.
I failed relationship building 101 on Twitter
I used to be selective on who I followed, only following people I was interested in. Two years ago, I had close to 60,000 followers on one account and 16,000 on another. And guess what happened? I began losing followers in masses. I am now down to 38,000!
Which makes sense, they have something they want to sell, so I need to give them the same attention I would like from them. That’s how relationships work. Lesson learned! It goes back to the golden rule, treat people how you want to be treated.
From my blog LAND OF TORNADOES https://landoftornadoes.wordpress.com/2018/02/14/how-people-hurt-their-brand-on-twitter/