Bad Twitter advice from Advertising Age
by Janet Green on February 22, 2010
in Social media, Twitter
It’s disappointing that David Berkowitz (representing the venerable Advertising Age – i.e., someone who should know better) would tell you, in one breath, that the single most important thing you can do when jumping into Social Media for business is to “establish your goals,” and then in the next breath tell you that the one person you should follow on Twitter is Shaquille O’Neal.
Now Shaq may indeed be a Twitter super-user, and he might even coin more words than Seth Godin. But recommending him as your one must-follow was a waste of an opportunity to give real, sound advice.
The person you should follow on Twitter, if you’re a business owner and really only have time to follow one, is the person in your industry who has taken the time to become a resource for others. This person:
- Posts a ton of links to relevant reading material
- Re-tweets useful stuff – not fluff
- Engages with those who reply to them
- Follows proportionally to their followers
- Blogs passionately about the industry and links out when appropriate to their own incredible blog
Having established that setting goals is “the most important thing” you can do when getting into social media, I’d say that the second most important thing you should do is make sure you’re not wasting your time by connecting with people who can’t help you meet them.
Thanks for your feedback, but I still stand by my recommendation to follow Shaq. He’s a brilliant Twitter user, constantly responding to his fans, finding creative ways to interact with them, and marketing himself in the process. He gets the communication, the listening, the promotion, the authenticity – he gets it all. So instead of coming up with some criteria for who to follow, I came up with a real recommendation. And the fact is that someone so new to Twitter won’t know how to find people who meet your criteria.
David, great of you to read and comment here, thank you. While I agree that all the qualities you mention are critical to making the most of Twitter (listening, authenticity, etc.), I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of whom to follow. For the record, it took me about a week to find the person who met the specific criteria in my industry that I listed above. This person exhibited all the same qualities you mention, but they had the added bonus of being relevant to my business goals beyond those underlying qualities.
By the way, I thought you were right on with your comments about the continuing value of blogs. In my present industry (marketing and communications), I’m surprised and disappointed to find there are those who don’t see the value of these amazing two-way communication tools.