Everyone on Twitter today started off as a newbie. We’ve all traveled the road of experience, making mistakes along the way. Learn from our collective wisdom, and avoid these common new user conversation mistakes to give yourself the best possible Twitter experience from the start.

• Before You Start: You have a business Twitter account. You have already improved your Twitter presence using our Twitter Profile Checklist.
• Learning Level: 2 | Getting Started
• Article Last Updated:  Sunday, December 4, 2011

Don’t Tell Us What You Are Doing

The Twitter message box says “What’s happening?” but do you really need to announce to the world that you are having a PB&J sandwich for lunch? Even if it is true? If you want to win friends and keep followers, think a little outside that box. Rather than share the mundane events of your life, talk about something interesting, or find an interesting aspect of what’s going on. What are you thinking about? What are you reading? What challenge do you face? If you can tell us that, and sometimes add a bit of humor and laugh at yourself, we’ll laugh with you and adore your tweets.

There’s nothing wrong with being honest. Just remember that everyone else is bogged down with the mundane details of their own life as well. We are all looking for a bright spot in the day, a reason to smile, and perhaps a reason to not take it all so seriously. Seriously.

Stay Spin Free

Social media is about being your authentic self, speaking with your own voice and saying your own thoughts. Transparency is the buzz word for this. Putting up your picture is one step in the right direction. But now you must take the risk to say things that are honest and true. That doesn’t mean you should share your deep, dark secrets or true confessions. Your Twitter community isn’t here to hold therapy sessions. Having a bad day? That’s okay to mention. We’ve all been there. Having a great day? Share you news with us.

Don’t Spam

Don’t  set up an auto-reply direct message to every new follower. Especially if your auto-reply message includes a sales pitch for your latest workshop or ebook. Instead, if you really want to connect with new followers, take a couple minutes to review their profiles. Check out their links. Review their tweet archive. Get a sense of what they bring to the conversation. If you send a new follower a reply or a direct message that includes a personal message from you, they will take notice in a good way. That’s the way to build relationships on Twitter. It’s one tweet at a time, on the other person’s topic, not your own.

Turn Off The Sales Machine

If you’ve got a blog, or an ebook, or a workshop, it’s okay for you to mention these things and include links to them. However, if you only ever talk about these things, or you always talk about yourself, followers are going to cancel their subscription to your tweets quickly.

Twitter isn’t just another platform for you to push your same old hypnotic marketing pitch, or to rant on about the many benefits from your amazing products. Save that stuff for your website and email campaigns. If you are not here to dialog with your community, to listen and talk, you are going to find yourself in a very small community. Maybe even a community of one.

Social media is a great marketing tool, but you have to understand the ground rules. Be real. Talk about things other than your pitch. Send good links to great content. Retweet other people’s brilliant tweets. Reply to people and engage them in conversations about the things they care about. Treat everyone like a real person. They will be much more likely to listen when you announce your workshop if they see you as one of the contributors in the community. In fact, they may even ask you about your workshop. Isn’t that a much nicer way to do business?

Your turn: What about you? Do you have different items on your conversation checklist? Different pet peeves? Share them here, and enlighten us all. Related Articles:

• Twitter Profile Checklist
• Your Twitter Web Link Options
• Your Twitter User Name Matters
• Visual Branding on Twitter
• Ebook: Twitter For Beginners
• Are You Really Engaging Your Customers?
• 9 Ways To Engage Your Twitter Community
• 6 Reasons Why Potential Customers Won’t Follow You on Twitter
• Setting Twitter Goals
• Using Your Twitter Goals