One of the conferences I sat in on at Blog World was about Twitter Gaming a term I hadn’t heard of until now. But I learned more than I wanted to know about Twitter and all the various ways to use it, good or bad, during my weekend amongst the nerds (me included!). So what exactly is Twitter Gaming and why is it causing such an uproar?… well I’ll tell ya…
Well some Twitter elite consider gathering as many followers as you can “twitter gaming” and are opposed to its wide spread nature on Twitter. But still others say that if you ever want to be able to pitch your services via your Twitter account you must have some merit. Merit on Twitter is judged by followers, followers are gained by either being famous, being a cewebrity or by finding interesting people following them and hoping they follow you back and tell their friends.
I personally like to follow back every person who follows me, someone told me it was polite when I got started and I still can’t shake the habit. Also I do tend to follow people who are interesting to me whenever I want and just divide them into different groups on Tweetdeck or Hootsuite so I can keep track of their tweets. But many of the Twitter elite I listened to seemed to think ratios of 1 following for every 10 followers was proper, others disagreed. It was a wide variety of opinions and none of them really meshed.
One important thing though, throughout several different speakers I continually found a theme… be yourself. The idea of being authentic online has been batted around a lot but I think it truly is the number 1 goal of social media, people want to hear about you and your thoughts because they find your profile relevant to them. This allows you to tweet about business, your business or where you work, to tweet about your feelings or to tweet about your thoughts… just be sure that you stay true to who you are and don’t try to “act” like a certain person or brand in order to gain followers or convert customers.
So for those of you who “Twitter Game” (and I guess considering my ratio on @marenkate I would be called one by some) be sure not to overdo it, try to be followed by those who you think can get something out of your message while following those who you can get something from. Tweet often, but not constantly and give your audience quality content in 140 characters or less. Be kind to Twits and Twits will be kind back, abuse your Twits and try to always push a sales page down their throats and well… your Twitter following will soon dwindle to just a few chirps here and there.
Not clear on Twitter? Try What is Twitter and How does it Work or hop on over to the best Twitter Marketing and Management site on the internet to really harness the power of Twitter for your business.
