How to avoid Twitter time suck

Using Twitter for business is at the same time tempting and challenging. Doing an effective job takes a significant time investment, but doing a bad job takes even longer due to the amount of time which can be wasted following (and probably not talking to) irrelevant people and broadcasting one-sided material to people who don’t want it.

Kevin Breuner, a musician, blogger and podcaster, has put together a list of ’5 Ways Your Band Can Avoid The Twitter Time Suck’ (which I found at Hypebot) and I think much of it can be applied to most brands on a wider scale.

Here are Kevin’s five tips, merged into fewer and adapted to take in non-music brands.

Clean your feed and follow with a purpose

If you’re using Twitter to spread the word, chances are you’ve followed hundreds of people who are (a) completely irrelevant or (b) probably irrelevant. Don’t worry about it, though, just get to unfollowing them sharpish. Social media should be about quality of interaction, not necessarily the number of eyes you’re in front of.

If you’re being followed by 600 people and only 200 are interested in music/football/laptops or whatever, you’re wasting your time. If you’re following 200 and they’re all part of your target audience, you’re maximising the opportunity. Well done.

Focus locally

The idea of local focus may not apply to all brands, as it is intended in Kevin’s post to reflect and contribute to a local music scene. But try to think of ‘local’ as something other than a geographical concept, too. Areas of interest arguably have global ‘scenes’, communities built up around particular passions but cutting through geographical boundaries.

If you’re a sociologist, I apologise for the previous sentence – I am aware that it’s a horrible mish-mash of terms which actually have specific meanings that differ from one another.

Really, employing a local focus ties into the same logic behind Kevin’s first two tips above: take your time and follow the right people, and you’ll get the best quality of return.

Interact

As a wise friend once said, you can only get the best out of Twitter if you’re “human”. If tweeting isn’t a central or recognised part of your job, it’s tempting to use it as little more than a broadcast channel. Again, if this is how you’re using Twitter your attentions would likely be better directed elsewhere.

Interaction is an important part of community building, and nowhere is this truer than on Twitter. Talk to your followers, retweet them and link to their stuff. By adding the personal touch you may be able to increase your followers’ identification with the brand.

Take the relationships into the real world

It’s important to be safe, of course, but meet people for a beer or a coffee. This is an extension of the previous point and will go a long way towards increasing your social media profile. People you’ve met, people who have your physical business card, will be more likely to think of you when considering, for example, a purchase in your industry.