Nobody likes an infomercial
One of the common mistakes I see on different social networking sites is a tendency toward sending out a stream of advertisements, in what is often a vain hope of attracting business. The reason it’s vain is that every single tweet is driven toward a goal of getting a sale as opposed to providing genuine and useful information. It should be obvious that social networks aren’t sales platforms, but many businesses try to treat them that way.
The reason this occurs is fairly simple. They are too busy thinking of the bottom line, of trying to make money, to consider the process by how that actually occurs. Instead businesses use social networks without a clear understanding of what the technology allows them to do. In fact, the tendency is ultimately to focus on the technology, without recognizing what the technology does: Namely connect us closer to other people.
Nobody likes an infomercial, so when put your status updates and tweets out there, spend a moment reading what you wrote and ask yourself, from the perspective of a reader, whether you would actually be interested in the message, whether it would actually speak to you. If it doesn’t for you, why would it for anyone else?
Look through your last thirty or so tweets and then ask yourself how many responses either on twitter or on your website you got from those tweets. If there’s no traffic and no responses then you have to question whether the activity is really productive. In fact, it isn’t productive if you aren’t getting a response.
Spending time looking at what you’ve written can help you determine if you are treating your audience like people, or like sales numbers. Can you guess how your audience would prefer to be treated?
