9 Mistakes I committed on Twitter and could’ve avoided !

Let me share a little secret with you. You know, whenever things are going perfectly alright, I tend to get nervous. Very nervous, because I know things are going too fine and they are too good to be true. Just can’t be that way right ? I mean, we all make mistakes, in fact should make mistakes. If there aren’t any mistakes you can find, then its because you are either non-human or you’re hiding them.

Failures are the stepping stones to success right ? I strongly believe this. I believe in making mistakes and in fact, encourage my trainees to make lot of them. They are opportunities to me, every single mistake is. While explaining things to someone, if he doesn’t ask any question back, and get it all right in the first go, I tend to get jittery. Its a clear signal to me that he isn’t understanding anything.

So when I think of my first days on Twitter, am glad I made those mistakes. Because had I not fooled around and made those mistakes I would have made them today and they would’ve proved costly to me. So, let me share with you some of the most “memorable”, mistakes I made on Twitter. I hope they will also help you make judgements about what is good for you.

1. Trying to “bait” popular tweeps to reply to me

Man, that’s one of the biggest mistakes I ever did on Twitter. Agreed that twitter lets you reply to anyone and they are “supposed to” reply back to us. But that doesn’t mean that you can poke anyone and possibly get them reply to you. I still don’t know the rules for getting to befriend a popular guy on Twitter, the only thing I know is that being genuine helps a lot.

2. Not using a background profile image.

I have a nice background now, but during the early days I thought that the black grunge bg was like “awesome”. Clearly, I didn’t check many other profiles and was confined to my “friends circle” if I can call it. If only I saw those beautiful twitter backgrounds earlier

Today the twitter background is a great resource to tell more about you and your brand. If you aren’t using it properly, I’m of the opinion that you aren’t using your Twitter profile to its fullest potential.

3. Not using an avatar and writing a clear, descriptive bio.

This is not a mistake, actually I didn’t know about it. I was so focused on the blog that I thought I needn’t write anything there worth mentioning. Today most people know me from the twitter profile, so you know how important it is to have a nice bio and avatar.

4. Not engaging in conversations.

Don’t get me wrong here. When I mean conversations, I mean mutually worthwhile and productive conversations. I still am not a fan of “Thank you” and “Good night” messages on Twitter. I personally think that they are a major turn offs for your majority of followers. But I’m a great fan of group discussions and productive talk. This normally happens around events (through hashtags) and meetups. They are fun because even though they are conversational pieces, other tweeps can also join in, they aren’t dialogues. And one major mistake I did earlier was not to engage in conversations, rather stick to one way messages. Lesson learned.

5. Writing negative/tasteless comments about myself that no one would ever want to read.

Its probably because I didn’t have too many followers that time and was a self cantered low life that whenever Twitter asked me the question “what are you doing” I said things like “Boring life”.. “Doing project reports” ..”Stupid weather” etc. They aren’t bad like not offensive or anything but still, what’s the point in writing them right ? I could’ve written them in my diary. But for the world to see ? #fail !!

5. Promoting my own site throwing up links.

Obviously I thought someone would click it and give me some hits. But I wouldn’t have done it if tweetdeck didn’t have the URL column. So not entirely my fault !

6. Seeing it as a secondary communication tool.

I was wrong. In my opinion Twitter is the best primary communication tool available today. Your blog and everything else takes the back seat. Earlier, I saw Twitter as a tool to “push thoughts and ideas”. Only later did I realize that its a communication channel that attracts ideas and thoughts, not the other way round.

7. Not sharing interesting stories with others.

I was pretty much active on social media like SU and Digg, but never saw Twitter as a tool to share interesting stories and links with others

8. Follow very less people and limit myself to my thoughts.

Biggest mistake. I was such a fool not to realize the power of Twitter. You know, most of the times we are inhibited by our thoughts that we don’t open up to opportunities. And I did exactly that. I limited myself to following a few hundred people and thought – this is it. but it wasn’t. Only when I opened up and started to follow more people did I realize that this thing is enormous. I had all the few hundred I initially followed in my IM anyway

9. Responding to automatic DMs.

Honestly, I thought those “thanks for following me” DM’s were genuine and replied to almost all of them. Now that you know, don’t laugh at me.

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