Quickly, a shout-out to our good friend, fellow Austinite, and street artist Mike Johnston (aka Truth) for the artwork (above).

We’re proud early adopters and we fondly remember the days of Twitter when it was like a cocktail party. You could have quick, informal conversations with any of your 19 followers (and you actually knew who they were).

Now, Twitter is more like a popularity contest between business people, brands, celebrities, spammers, and fake accounts (a lot more than you think) competing for your attention, follows, RTs, and mentions. Oh, and some of your 19 friends actually stuck around.

Over the past 34 months, we’ve learned a lot about our company, our “product” and services, and we also learned a lot about social media marketing on Twitter. Here are three of the three-hundred lessons we’ve learned about social media marketing on Twitter.

  1. Avoid free social media tools to automatically favorite tweets, boost your followers, automatically RT people on Twitter, and generally just automate your entire Twitter presence.
    Social media is about starting a conversation (and continuing it…). It’s not about how many people you have following you, because you’d be surprised how many of those are fake Twitter profiles. Case-in-point: At one point, Hillary Clinton had over 1 million fake Twitter followers.
  2. Don’t use automatic direct messaging apps for social selling.
    It’s annoying when the first thing you receive from an account you just started following is a three paragraph automated Twitter DM about anything other than a “thank you.” Even simply saying “thank you” is kind of annoying, though…right?! Think about this: You walk into a store and the “greeter” (while talking to someone else) hands you a coupon book and says “thanks for coming in.” That’s essentially what your automatic Twitter DM says to followers.
  3. Use our magic ratio of selfless sharing.
    What is the magic ratio of selfless sharing on Twitter? It’s a ratio of the number of things you share on Twitter that are about others vs. about you. That ratio is 11:1. For every 11 things you share on Twitter about others, you can share 1 thing about yourself (and vise versa). MLK said it best:

“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

We love this quote so much, we shared it on our Instagram profile last MLK Day.

FYI: We learned a lot more than just three lessons about social media marketing on Twitter. These are just the ones we decided to share. If you’re interested in learning more about effective social media marketing on Twitter (or anything else we do) please contact us.

Thanks for your time!