The mute button is a beautiful thing. It can help you quiet your TV when you’d rather not listen to Vern Lundquist’s hackneyed commentary on your favorite college football team. If you’re on a conference call, the mute function on your phone can cut down on interference when others are talking. Want to know where else you can hit the mute button? Twitter.
Introduced last May, muting the people and businesses you follow became an option on the social network. Rather than unfollow someone, you can just mute them and keep the contact. It so simple to do; all a user has to do is visit a tweet from the offending source, click on the options button and choose to mute said user. This may seem awesome for your personal account, but then there’s that business account you manage.
Have you been seeing a drop-off in your business’s Twitter engagement recently? If you haven’t gotten a slough of people unfollowing your organization, it might be your followers are hitting the mute button on your content. Since there is no way to track when or how many of your followers are hitting the mute button, it can make it extremely difficult to uncover any mistakes you are making on the account.
Does the idea of the mute function on Twitter make you quake in your boots? Rest assured that there are steps you can take to ensure your followers will proudly follow your business.
Here are some tips for keeping those Twitter followers away from that mute button.
Watch your Tweet Amount
One Google search will churn up 511 million results about how often one should post to Twitter. I’ve even talked about it before. It’s a hot topic and one that is divisive amongst marketers everywhere, but what you won’t ever read is someone advising you to send out a cluster of 20 tweets within 5 minutes. That is simply begging Twitter users to mute you. Take the time to make sure the amount you are posting is within reason and works for your followers.
Don’t Be a Retweet Machine
If your account is not a bot account, then create and share content by your organization. Retweets by other users are great for engaging with and gaining new followers, but put a cap on the amount that you retweet other users tweets. The golden standard for most things is the 80/20 rule, meaning 80 percent of the content can come from retweets and 20 percent of the content is from your business. For both retweeted and your content, be sure that the content is either engaging or helpful. Want to know if your organization is bot-like? Find out here!
Engage with your Followers
If you are only posting your content to Twitter without speaking to your followers, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Take the time to thank them for retweeting your content or send a quick tweet to new followers. Be personal. Act like a human being. Though Twitter’s value lies in widely sharing content, it’s also a great resource for connecting with new and old customers alike. Make them feel valued.
The Twitter mute button is not the end of the world for businesses, but there are steps your organization needs to take to keep followers from shushing them forever. Paying attention to the amount of tweets you’re sending out, limiting retweets and sharing your own content paired with sincere engagement with your followers should keep those itchy fingers at bay.
What does your organization do to keep its Twitter followers engaged? Tell us in the comments.
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