10 surefire ways to fail at Twitter

As marketers, we have to communicate with customers where they are, and many would-be customers are on Twitter.

Of the dealers I see on Twitter, many of them just broadcast. Their strategy is to shout things to the world, and that’s a mistake. Twitter is conversational. It’s person to person. You may be a brand, but people want to know there’s a real person behind the brand.

Any chance you have to be closer to the customers and help them buy from you is pretty awesome. Shouting marketing messages will not bring the customer closer.

In the past few weeks, I’ve had a few dealers ask me questions about Twitter. That tells me more are warming up to it and are ready to join the biggest conversations in the world. Participating in these conversations establishes credibility and trust with your customers. Once you have that, you can comfortably reach out to others in the community with marketing messages.

You must establish credibility and trust first.

There are many pitfalls Twitter newbies can avoid once they learn the lingo. Twitter is like going to a foreign country. You have to learn the language to not look like a doofus. Twitter has its own language: @mentions, #hashtags, retweets, shortened URLs, and of course, all tweets must be fewer than 140 characters.