During last night’s super bowl game (or brand bowl or puppy bowl or whatever you might have been watching) the twitter-verse was aflutter with 140 character discussion of the game, the commercials and the Black-Eyed Peas. One thing was abundantly clear: auto-tweets are not welcome.
5 Reasons not to auto-tweet:
1) You will lose followers.
2) Those who still follow, will ignore you.
3) Its anti-social. Why tweet if you aren’t trying to have a dialogue? Most reactions happen within 5-10 minutes. You can’t engage your audience if you aren’t around.
4) It’s misleading, especially auto-DM’s. People who are new to social media think those are real. Others immediately un-follow anyone who sends an auto-DM.
5) Auto-tweets sometimes make the user look dumb. Case in point: last night while everyone was hating on the Black Eyed Peas, someone had scheduled a string of quotes on Bhuddist meditation. The quotes had nothing to do with the conversation. Imagine a tent revival preacher preaching to a casino. It didn’t work. The meditation quotes or something like it, may have prompted this tweet:
@CoachGlitter: The auto tweeters shouldn’t underestimate the intelligence of their followers.
Just to play Devil’s advocate, I’ll leave you with this post from Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan)
I asked people on Facebook whether or not they do or don’t, should or shouldn’t schedule tweets here and there using a service like Hootsuite. Instead of telling you what I think, I wanted to share their learned opinions. For the seeing impaired, the consensus was heavily weighted towards it being okay and recommended to schedule certain kinds of tweets (like links to posts, etc):
