Biz Stone is one of the co-founders of Twitter. He’s now CEO of a new company called Jelly. The Washington Post ran an interview with him in yesterday’s edition, for its On Leadership series. You should read the entire interview but here is Biz’s best Twitter tip:
Just be authentic. That’s the only way to go. Over and over and over it comes back to that. People try all kinds of different things, and when they just present themselves as human, that’s when people connect with them.
Exactly. This is why robo-tweeting, as I discussed a few weeks back, doesn’t work. This is why humble-bragging and endless self-promotion turn potential followers off. It’s rude and it’s not how you would interact in person.
When you act as you do “in real life” you develop real relationships and therefore get the “engagement” that you should be aiming for. You talk with people not at people. You help others out. You act graciously. It’s called being human, and if you are a likeable human, you may actually get people wanting to follow you on Twitter.
About Deborah Brody
Deborah Brody writes and edits anything related to marketing communications. Most blog posts are written under the influence of caffeine.
It’s work. One of the first things I wrote about Twitter. Scheduling – selectively reading then sharing a few things of interest, then spacing them out over a day – that’s different. All this noise, all these automated feed driven tweets, is just that, noise; and then some of the vary same people feeding the machine are the ones decrying the platform’s usefulness. See also FB; one thing G+ has going for it is that the API hasn’t opened up to this kind of automated, robo posting.
I still really like Twitter; what it is for me isn’t what it is for everyone else, I get that. Still.. as a biz communicator I look at so many brands and how they run their Twitter (all SM really) and think, ‘damn they are doing it wrong.’
And FWIW, one day soon I’m gonna go on a “humble-bragging” rant, so world… consider yourself on notice. 😉
Hi Davina,
Absolutely it’s work. It’s having a conversation with many many people. If you don’t have time for it, I say don’t do it. Scheduling some tweets is fine but this idea that you can automate your life on Twitter is so counter-productive.
And let me know when you go on the rant…I am sure I will agree with it all!
Thanks for reading and commenting!
Deborah