“Thanks for following me on Twitter”
Twitter is a great social media tool to connect, join the most interesting conversations and find out news in a split of a second when no one else on channel 9,10 or 7 has their full details yet.
I see Twitter as an instant messenger of today, like what MSN messenger used to be when you’d come home from school and continue chatting to all your friends online.
In a way its also a text message platform, but your phone bill doesn’t go through the roof and you can get “text messages” from your idols, leading speakers or a mate down the road.
When the bombing happened at Moscow airport on the 24th of January 2011, it was a global news event and a pretty scary occurence as myself and a few relatives were about to fly via Moscow to get to a wedding in St Petersburg, Russia.
I immediately logged onto Twitter, typed in Moscow bombing and connected with a few Moscow based reporters on the spot while the event was still happening. It felt surreal, but the updates I got from those reporters in the instant were so much more accurate and sincere than anything I’ve seen on the news ever since.
That’s when I started to appreciate the power of Social Media, especially Twitter. It is also unbelievable how Egypt went through a revolution with the power of Twitter alone. There is a great communal strength in what Social Media can achieve and by no means should it be underestimated or taken lightly.
On a lighter note, when growing your following on Twitter, I found that it was easier to follow the Tweeps I liked and groups I had an interest in. So I added a whole bunch to my Following pile.
2 seconds later my inbox blew up with ” Thanks for the follow” messages.
I got excited and keen to draft up one of these ” Thank you!” messages as I too became a loyal Twitter user, but once your account is set up and active, Twitter doesn’t seem to have an easy way to do it. So I “Googled” a how to. To my surprise this article came up:
Should You Send an Automated DM to New Twitter Followers?
Why I didn’t know there was a “should you”!
This article was interesting and talked about the new craze of creating an auto message to your followers and asking them to follow your blog (presicely my objective!) or add you on FB etc. Then it went on to talk about a seminar on Twitter in the States and how many found the messaging annoying and almost frustrating. But why?
“I don’t even know you yet. We don’t have a relationship and you’re already asking me to take some action?!?”
was probably the key insight on why that I got from the article . This woman is onto something.
Twitter is for communication and building relationships with people. An instant message is very impersonal and quite cliche, plus reinforcing her words – you are asking this new follower of yours to do about a thousand other things for you – how demanding can you be? They already are following everything you have to say about anything on Twitter!
Basically, as you can see me hovering over this, the article talked me out of creating a Twitter automated ” Thanks for the follow” response as on main stream of thought, my sole aim of Twitter IS to build relationships with my favourite Tweeps.
So I don’t have a Twitter message of Thanks ( I am thankful though to those who follow @jake213 – Gracias! )
Have a read of the full article here:
http://thebabyboomerentrepreneur.com/380/should-you-send-an-automated-dm-to-new-twitter-followers/
You can also read about the Moscow attack here if you’re interested:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/24/us-russia-blast-airport-idUSTRE70N2TQ20110124
And Egypt uprising and Twitter:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/10/egypt-twitter-idUSLDE7192J420110210