There are a lot of ‘growth hacks’ on Twitter, with some being more annoying than others. When it comes to skiing yourself, what would you say is the most annoying growth hack you’ve seen? Directly asking for likes and retweets? Empty promises about profiles that supposedly ‘follow back’?
Social Media Today put the question up for their Twitter SMT community, yielding a couple of interesting insights regarding what bothers social media marketers the most, at least in this respect.
Annoyed
If you guess ‘Hashtag for every word’, then you guessed right! Garnering around 37.2% of all responses, putting a Hashtag for every word (#every #word # sentence) to emphasize a post is found to be most annoying. Yes, while Hashtags can connect users to broader conversations, Hashtagging random words don’t really help. If you think about it, not a lot of people really go on Twitter to specifically search for an irrelevant-themed discussion under, say, #Blessed.
For those wanting to correct and are guilty of Hashtag misuse, Social Media Today encourages following these steps:
Perform relevant Hashtag and keyword research by using tools such as Twitonomy. Know what the popular and most commonly used Hashtags are to incorporate into your own Tweet strategy.
Further streamline Hashtag use and attribution by running them through a second time with tools such as Hashtagify.
Organize notable Hashtags into ordered listings based on overall usage and traction, even if some of them aren’t ones that you’d want to use.
Double-down on real-time trending Hashtags by using a tool like Twitter Trends.
Hone in on the tags that really relate to your business and do away with those that have nothing but unrelated chatter.
Of course, ideal Hashtag use also depends on your focus – Twitter itself advises that if you want to have more people clicking on an embedded CTA, then adding Hashtags at all may dilute your messaging due to having an additional ‘clickable’ alternative. Likewise, if you want to drive traffic towards a specific action, then it might be best to omit Hashtags entirely. The moral of the story is just don’t Hashtag random words; people don’t like seeing them.
Follow-for-follow comes in second and is honestly just a nicer way of putting ‘follow-begging’. Automated DMs have never been particularly effective while latching onto unrelated trends just looks tacky and cheap unless executed well. What we’re trying to say is unless you can come up with something like Oreo’s ‘Dunk in the Dark’ Tweet, then you’re better off staying clear of latching onto off-topic discussions.
The Wrap
In a nutshell, to successfully market on Twitter, your strategy has to be clever and tactical, though neither of the two is easily achieved. Here’s an analogy – for every Wendy’s Twitter account, those that win over audiences with sass and wit, many more try out the same and simply end up flaming and just being downright offensive, which is hilarious in our opinion, but distasteful in the eyes of the majority.
The reality is that being good on Twitter isn’t easy, but learning how to be good might just yield you great results. Hopefully, these notes help you out a little on that front. At the very least, you dodge a couple of the common pitfalls that often stagnate people’s marketing growth on the platform.
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