Twitter is suddenly really popular. Had you noticed? Everybody from Shaq to my mom (true story) is on there now. As with anything that becomes popular, the level of noise has increased dramatically. Lots of folks trying to tell you how to get rich quick, or share awesome marketing secrets with you. Don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of awesome marketing secrets. I like Twitter because it sparks conversations: I connect with people I find interesting. I goof around a bit, I network a bit, I share bits and pieces of my life (personal and professional), and vice versa. Above all though it’s authentic: there are real people on the end of the tweets.
And so to the issue of Auto DMs. For those that don’t know, a DM is a “Direct Message”, a Twitter message that goes only to one person (i.e. is not visible on the public stream). Kindof like a mini email sent just to you. There are sites out there that will let you send one automatically, meaning that if I follow you on Twitter, the site recognizes that and automatically sends you a message.
They’ve been quite a hot topic on Twitter lately, with a lot of folks on there having a pretty vehement dislike of them, myself included. The reasoning is that Twitter is a very personal, conversation driven platform, so ‘faking it’ by sending an automatic canned message (e.g ‘thank you for following me, looking forward to connecting with you’) is disengenuous. Much better to send a personal message (either DM or @) when the mood takes you, rather than automating it. After all, how interested in me are you if you’re sending me the exact same message you send everyone else who follows you? I’ve gotten auto DMs with broken links in them (great promotion, huh?), and ones with too much text that just cut off mid sentence. Those ones make me feel really special.
I feel the same way about auto-following folks. You can use those same applications to recognize when somebody has followed you, and immediately recipricate. Again, there’s no value here: I want you to follow me because you’re interested/engaged/amused by what I have to say, not as a de facto, tit for tat thing. If you automatically follow me because I’ve followed you, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Follow me because I’m interesting, not to return a favor.
Full disclosure here: I briefly used an auto responder out of laziness for a while on @kaimoviereviews – all it said was ‘thanks for following, I take requests’ – figured I should let people know they could ask me to review movies, but after giving it a little more thought I realized that if they were interested enough to follow, they’d be interested enough to read my profile or click the link (or DM/@ me) and find out for themselves.
So what’s your take on the automation thing. Big deal, or not so much? Do yo u follow everyone who follows you, or are you more selective?
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