How To Piss People Off On Twitter - A Lesson In Etiquette
On 11/28 I had a guest post on Hypebot about showing appreciation for your fans.
It seemed as if everyone generally enjoyed the strategy I discussed in the post and it was tweeted by a bunch of people. I typically “favorite” every link someone tweets to my posts as a way of showing my appreciation. I don’t use Twitter for marketing my business or myself except when I occasionally release a blog post. Instead, I prefer to use Twitter as a platform for sharing interesting news about tech and music with friends as well as photos of things I’m currently enjoying.
Sometimes I follow people who tweet my posts or whose tweets I simply find interesting. I don’t expect all of these people to follow me back.
There is one sure-fire way to piss most people off on Twitter after they follow you:
- Follow your current follower back or follow someone and wait for them to follow you.
- DM them some (often rather spammy) message.
- Unfollow them immediately after sending the DM.
Today’s culprit is Vampire Sex Kittens. They are far from the only Twitter user that employs this tactic but they are getting singled out in this blog post because it was the one time too many.
Why B(r)ands do this:
- They falsely believe they can somehow increase their “Follower” count and keep a low “Following” count.
- They want to spam someone but don’t want to let that person DM them back.
Why they should abandon this practice:
- I wanted to reply to their DM thanking them for spreading the link to my Hypebot post but couldn’t. Instead, I’m now writing this post.
- Imagine I did listen to their song and loved it. Maybe I would connect them with a venue, journalist, record label, etc. Instead, when I try to message them back I see what they did and write this post.
Delusions of Grandeur
Earlier this week I wrote a guest post on Hypebot that discussed the issues of faking a fanbase and watering down the average value of a “like” or follow. I outlined a number of reasons that this was bad with a main one being that lies are irreversible.
What I didn’t get into was the idea of what a lie can do to the artist and their perception of themselves.
The image above (edited to protect the guilty) was a status posted yesterday by a DJ from the New England area. He seems pleased to be one of the top 2,000 DJs in the world according to TopDeeJays.com, a website that ranks DJs by their combined social media influence across all networks.
Methodology (from TopDeeJays.com):
Topdeejays uses an algorythm (sic) that measures general social media influence by combining Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, SoundCloud, MySpace, Last.fm and YouTube fans, subscribers and followers. In order to avoid mixing apples and oranges, it uses a unique measurement – TDJ points to rank artists by popularity. Take TDJ points as a currency to measure value of each participating social network’s members.
Here are the stats for this DJ:
There is a saying that goes, “if it smells like sh-t and tastes like sh-t then it is probably not a legitimate DJ ranking (I’m paraphrasing).” As you can see, there is a downward trend for every network. The truth is that this DJ purchased almost every “like” and follow, something that becomes instantly apparent to anyone that visits his Facebook page when they see such an engagement deficit. Someone with 10k+ fans should be averaging more than 3 “likes” per status even if only half of those fans were real.
The big issue here isn’t the deception of others, it is the deception of the DJ himself. Rather than be aware that he truly has loads of work to do in order to get anywhere close to being one of the top DJs in the world he is completely satisfied with a fake, masturbatory statistic because, let’s face it, this is much easier and self-satisfying than seeing that there are tens of thousands of DJs that are more well-known.
When you lie, it hurts you more than it could possibly hurt anyone else. It breeds complacency inside of your heart and causes you to rest on imaginary laurels.
Side-note: this DJ was booked for a Boston show on a Friday night earlier this year. Want to guess how many of his 11k fans showed up?
3.
THREE.
Perhaps three fans are 80% of his un-purchased “likes” on Facebook. In that case I suppose it was fairly impressive.
You “Like” Me, You Really Don’t Like Me
There has been much discussion and debate over the value of a “like” on Facebook or a follow on Twitter. This speculation is pointless because the value depends entirely on the way a new follower is acquired and that can happen any number of ways. People (mostly bands and musicians) often ask me how to get more followers on Facebook and Twitter, even though I only have a small amount myself. I think they are hoping for some magic answer and I cannot say that I blame them. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just click a few buttons and everyone started listening to what we were trying to say?
The short answer is that there is no simple way to go out and get followers other than by continually creating and releasing content that people value and want to keep up-to-date with. The long answer is that by doing anything other than this you will greatly water down the value of your average “like” or follower and be communicating with the wrong people, or in some instances no one at all.
How can you devalue your “likes” or follows? It is much easier than you might imagine. I will go through the list starting with the more obvious actions and progressing to things that seem innocuous but can be hurtful to the relationship with not only your fans but also your friends and family.
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