If you use Twitter as much as the rest of the world seems to be, you’ve probably noticed the plethora of tools created specifically for aiding in Twitter account management. Hummingbird helps to grow and manage friends and followers. Hootsuite manages scheduled tweets, provides a custom URL shortener and basic stats (among other things). TweetDeck and Twhirl allow you to tweet, search for other people and manage multiple accounts directly from your desktop. The list goes on and on.

One of the features that many of these kinds management tools offer is automated direct message responses to new followers. For example, you start to follow someone and then shortly thereafter you receive a direct message from them that says something like, “Thanks for the follow! Check out my website: makebenjaminsonlines.com”. Kind of hard to believe that someone would really say that if they were personally responding to you, right?

Understandably, many businesses and organizations don’t have a dedicated person to handle their Twitter account 24/7 and so the automated messaging option seems like a great way to acknowledge someone for following them without having to directly reply to each and every new follower. Especially if using a tool like Hummingbird to help you find new followers, the number of messages you’d have to respond to each day (while also, you know, working your regular job) can be daunting. But how effective are automated messages when it comes to social media and building quality followers?

It seems like a lot of “internet marketers” have turned Twitter into a numbers game. It’s all about building followers and then blasting them with information followed by very minimal interaction. As another human being/consumer/web user/regular person, I’ve started noticing how many people use automated messaging in a way that is so obviously…automated. Completely unauthentic, disengaging and unmotivating. Well, I suppose motivating enough for me to click “unfollow”.

First of all, if I start following someone, I don’t want to be sent a direct message with a link to their website. Considering it’s probably already linked on their Twitter profile, if I was that interested I would have checked it out already. And who knows, maybe I started following you on Twitter because of your website? Hence, if your direct message sounds like an advertisement, you’ve already lost my attention. It’s like you’ve missed the point of social media or you’re not even trying that hard to actually be engaging or transparent. Second of all, I do the same thing when considering someone’s tweets. If they sound like a monologue, constantly linking to their website, never interacting with their followers, basically acting like a commercial rather than a person: bye bye birdie.

It’s probably unrealistic to expect businesses, especially small businesses and one person shops, to have the time to respond personally to every new follower, reply or retweet. However, I think maintaining some level of “realness” in your tweets and messaging is really what Twitter (and social networking) is all about. Leveraging authenticity and efficiency is definitely possible but may not quite be as “free and easy” as all the web marketing hype going around right now seems to suggest. People want to feel like they’re connecting to other human beings and people-powered information, whether they’re following Starbucks or the coffee shop down the street. So if you find yourself adding to the noise instead of contributing to a conversational community, maybe it’s time to start rethinking your strategy?

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Image by Torley