I love Twitter and have been using the service since March 20th of 2007. I’ve just surpassed 25 thousand tweets and have only 950 followers. 950 seems like a lot but for someone that has done 25 thousand posts in just over a year, for someone to follow you, they must be extremely interested in what you have to say. I receive replies to every one of my tweets and that’s a sign of a true relationship with my followers. How many of your posts receive a reply?
How do I respond back? more than half of the time, I use direct messages to reply back to replies. It’s private, personal and I prefer it. I hate receiving direct messages from others because Twitter’s messaging system isn’t very fast at all but you can send direct messages from Twitter’s main page once you’ve logged in.
Type ,”d adamjackson Hi” and you’ve just sent a direct message. There’s no need to go to the messages page to do this. The same rule works on Twitter clients across all platforms (even iPhone) and via SMS text messages.
Replies are distracting and followers don’t like seeing your conversations with others. Think of it this way. Every day, you come home and your roommate is watching Jeopardy and that’s on at all times when you’re at the house. Eventually, you tune out the sound of the buzzers and dialogue and sounds that normally stand out become background noise.
If I have ten followers and 50% of my posts are replies to people or conversations back and forth with someone they don’t follow, know of or remotely care about then they ignore some of my posts at first and eventually as a follower browses his or her Twitter page and sees posts from the 100 people they follow, my posts begin to fade and are skipped over more often. It’s training the mind. If someone is talking but not talking to you, your interest in what they are saying weakens.
23% of my posts are replies to other people. I have thousands of direct messages back and forth with people but of 25 thousand posts, 23% is a very low number. I polled 25 random people on Twitter via TweetStats.com and all of them have over 50% reply ratios. Everyone has their own style but just know that your tweets become irrelevant over time and your followers start classifying your posts as background noise.
Be unique, fun, normal and don’t make Twitter a chat room because you won’t go anywhere and the only reason you’ll get more followers is if you’re Internet famous.
Latest Twitter Posts
3 Comments until now.
I sort of agree. I think one reply to a tweet can be informative and help expand the conversation. That’s what social media and networking are about - conversations. If you’re following people who aren’t talking about things that aren’t interesting to you, why follow?
The same could be said of initial tweets about trivial things. Do I really want to know EVERYTHING someone is doing?
This isn’t a slam on you, Adam. Just my humble opinion.
Completely and the fantastic thing about Twitter is that it’s different to every person. We all need Twitter for different reasons.
I’ve received emails from readers asking me how do they grow the relationship with their followers. They don’t want more followers just a better relationship and my formula has always been to be unique and not flood your followers with conversations that they have no interest in.
Of course, I see your way as having value as well. Some individuals post only replies and I stop following them very quickly.
I’ll go with the DM being better than @replies, but I am concerned with people asking questions on Twitter and they don’t reply that they thought the answer was worth it. I think ignoring a Reply provides no value to being on Twitter.
Comment!