It’s always good to have a clearout and declutter, we even blogged about this back at Christmas. I decided yesterday evening to have a good clear out on a Twitter profile we have, cutting down on those we follow to make sure our timeline is full of information and tweets we want to see. When you set up your social media profiles, the first thing you tend to do is go around following others in your field, or businesses you know and like.
I was amazed at how many of those had inactive profiles now, and probably cut down the following count by 15% in total. I decided to unfollow the profiles who hadn’t tweeted in over a year, giving a bit of a benefit of the doubt reasoning as to why someone may not have tweeted in 2019 so far. I then came across a huge swath of “lazy marketers”, which I also swiftly unfollowed. It was after opening so many profiles and seeing this, that I thought I really ought to write a blog.
So what is this “lazy marketing” that I’m talking about? So bear in mind I was only on Twitter, I’m not talking about lazy marketing in general here. Here are the things I came across that made me go “no thanks”:
- Linking the Twitter profile to Facebook – so when the Facebook page has a post, it automatically goes onto Twitter. In most cases a Facebook post is over the Tweet limit, so you end up getting a link to Facebook to read more. Lazy. Don’t cross post, and don’t set up these automatic links. Also, bear in mind your audiences are different on the different platforms.
- Only retweeting – I came across a good handful of profiles that had only been retweeting, so there was no original content from them at all. This can be fine, if the retweets are of value, but I followed that profile to find out what they have to say.
- Sharing pages or posts with just the title – another bugbear, and lazy marketing. A lot of the more “news” focused profiles that I follow(ed) would share a blog post of theirs, but only use the title of the blog post in their tweet. We already know the title, because it automatically generates a preview when you insert a link into a tweet. So expand a bit more, think more about why your followers might want to see that particular post, and don’t be lazy!
- In some cases, where I followed the company on other platforms as well, I simply unfollowed them on Twitter for sharing the same content. Now, in the main there isn’t anything wrong with this. Share the same content across social media, just don’t do it right at the same time. Imagine how boring your Facebook feed and your Twitter timeline are when the same companies share the same content. Dull, dull, dull. Jig it up a little, if you want to share the same post, perhaps give us a different insight on Twitter to what you did on Facebook. There are ways around it to make your social media look more interesting.