I don’t specifically mean that businesses should resist the idea that their company should have a presence on Twitter, quite the contrary. Twitter is a wonderful tool to adopt for using in your social media arsenal.
I get a large number of Twitter followers every day which comes to my inbox. Some of those Twitter users are merely robots out to get some other benefit to Twitter besides its main purpose, and others yet are businesses trying to use the tool. I don’t specifically use the auto-respond feature of Twitter because I want to vet each and every follower I have in my community.
The “urge” I discuss in the title here is the idea that Twitter is another way to shove your message down the throat of consumers or customers like other uses of direct marketing tools. Twitter is not to be used as a pulpit or a soapbox and should not be used to broadcast noise. I see many businesses immediately using Twitter to get people to come to their site and buy their products. They give out coupons, links to pages, links to the store and e-commerce site. Not a single conversation is taking place. Not a link to something that might interest me about their industry, not something about them that might make me interested in their company, and not something that makes me want to click through.
Twitter is tough to implement as I have said before, but using it in the way I am seeing is only making it more difficult for others to use. Resist the urge.
