Bad Tweets

Socialmedia Today has an article up on Twitter cracking down on Recurring Tweets.

The important thing to remember here is that a Recurring Tweet is not to be confused with the Retweet. A Recurring Tweet is when you post the same thing multiple times per day, a Retweet is when you repost something someone else said.

I'm really happy with this decision. There's nothing more obnoxious than searching for a keyword only to find a company monopolozing the search page with recurring tweets. I remember searching for what people were saying about "District 9" a couple months back, only to be greeted with pages of people and companies tweet spamming their advertisements over and over with the #District9 attached. For those of you reading this who have used this strategy to market, either adding hashtags that have nothing to do with your tweet or using recurring tweets, there's a lesson on social media to be learned.

Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, and Blogger are first and foremost social networking sites. They were not created as an advertising tool for companies to reach a large number of people quickly and efficiently. While we can (and indeed should!) use those mediums for those purposes, a line has to be drawn.

By using recurring tweets and unrelated hashtags, you are diminishing the networking experience. You are cheapening it, you are polluting it. Do not force your message onto people like that. Will you be noticed? Yes. Will it be good for your company? Not a chance. No one ever sees tweets like that and says,"Gee, I'm sure glad Company X took up my entire search page with advertising tweets." They say,"Really? You've gotta be ----ing me." You're only damaging your online reputation.

The solution is to instead become a contributing member of the community. Manually search for people who are tweeting about products you sell, ask them questions about their experience. Find people who are tweeting about problems with your competitors, let them know you exist. A little effort in social media goes a long way. It's supposed to be personal, stick with it.