Twitter isn’t really all that hard to grasp yet I see people do a complete fail on it every day. Why? Well mostly because they either won’t take the time to understand it or because they try to farm it out to some hack to do it for them.
There is one that come to mind instantly for me. I won’t tell you who but I will give you the what and why. Then there are a few that I think do it brilliantly.
I follow twitter in a sort of subliminal way all day. I sit at a computer and I have the feed run constantly in the side bar. If something catches my eye, I click over to Seesmic to take a closer look. As a result I see the good and the bad. It takes a lot for someone to annoy me enough to unfollow them, and only once have I been so miffed I reported someone as a spammer. Usually if someone is failing I find it amusing and keep following to see if they ever get it.
This morning I tipped over.
I have been following a company that I know has hired a marketing agency to handle their twitter account. I know this because I have talked to them several times about it. They are paying an unholy amount of money every month and yes the agency is tweeting and yes the tweets are related to the kind of business they have , well sort of. What tipped me over is how rich the possibilities are for this place to have one of the most drool worthy feeds out there. The problem is that every tweet sounds canned and almost clinical. There is no passion, no personality, nothing to make me want need to go explore them. There is no way some flack sitting in an office 100 miles away can make me want to come smell the flowers that are in bloom that day or greet the koi fish as the pond awakens for the spring, or feel the morning mist as it rises off the lawns. This is the reason that the best tweets come from the people that are passionate and in the moment.
The best of twitter is when someone lets us in on their passions. They suck us in and make us want to be a part of their world. Face it, in marketing that is the very first step to client attraction.
Yes, most businesses use twitter for marketing, but twitter isn’t the same old kind of marketing. It is about client attraction first, sales later.
I use dating as a metaphor for client attraction a lot, so that is what I going to go with here. When you are at a party or club or somewhere with a group of potential dating material, first you check out their looks and presentation (Branding) but over time, it is their personality, how they behave and interact the really seals the attraction. We are all more likely to want to bond or pursue those that display the passions and characteristics that we seek. Do they show the traits that attract you? Are they real? There are always those people in the group that are perfectly turned out and presented but that show absolutely nothing about who they really are. They might as well be mannequins.
The same thing goes for your Twitter feed. Show your passion if you truly want to stand out in the mass of chatter. Be real.
This goes for most of us.
There are some who have been able to be amazing on Twitter without showing a bit of personality. They do show passion, and we want to share that passion. The one that comes to mind immediately is @GuyKawasaki. As much as he tweets I doubt seriously that he does it all himself. Still I and 223,562 other people follow him. Why? Because the links he shares are always interesting. He has possibly assembled a team that shares his passion for the interesting and amusing. However he does it, he is brilliant.
You can be brilliant to, just share your passions with me. If something makes your blood rise, tell me. If something makes you smile, share it and make me smile too. Share your triumphs and let me cheer with you. Share your reality with me. You never know, you may find out that we really like you. That’s when we buy from you.
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