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Photo courtesy of Sarah Stewart (2010)

Twitter is a fascinating network – the more you’re online sharing your views and defining your brand, the more followers you may attract. It might seem that having a large amount of followers is always ideal, but not monitoring who is following you is not good for your brand. Potential customers/clients or employers might just be inclined to check out your followers, so it’s a good practice to check out your followers every couple of weeks and perhaps block a few unsavoury tweeters. Sometimes you will have to give a mysterious follower the benefit of the doubt to ensure not to deter a potential customer, but here is a quick way to evaluate a questionable follower: Take a look at their Twitter homepage. If they’re not identified as a real person or are following thousands of people, yet have no followers, best practice is to block them. The same applies if all of their tweets are just invitations to buy products or click on strange links. Potential customers want to see the type of people you engage with and that influential people are following you. A well-maintained followers’ list will give them a sense of your connections, network and overall industry influence.

One thing you can do to show off your network to potential customers is to build a public list. Certainly a list of company employees is an obvious choice, but there are a whole variety of lists which you can develop. Perhaps a list of causes your employees believe in and support, or maybe a list of trusted partners and suppliers. This kind of online “high five” can help communicate the type of company you are, the work you do and what you believe in.