Companies vs. Twitter users

As twitter and micro blogging are gaining popularity, some slovenian companies and political parties had decided to open twitter accounts and gather as many followers as possible. But their strategy might annoy many twitter users.

As we know many twitter users start to follow who ever follows them. So if they get an email that notifies them xzy has began to follow them they go and see who this xyz is and click on the follow button (giving a “favor” back).

So what happens if a particular company decides to follow the majority of slovenian users? They might go on the http://twittercounter.com/pages/country?time_zone=Ljubljana website and get the link to the approx. 750 slovenian users of twitter. And it’s not so hard to click on each user and start following them. So if you then calculate their success rate - by success I mean getting a follower - it can be betwen 5 and 30% - for free! And this is a fantastic conversion - just think about CTR of banners or open rate for e-newsletters - they are both much lower.

But what about the perception of those companies, brands … by the twitter users? Iwould say that this is like spam - obtrusive, rude and unwanted - at least for me personally. You can write what you think about such strategies in the comments I’ll be glad to read them.

The right way to go about is to target your existing users - people who are already interested in you, your product, brand, organization … Send a link to your twitter account in your monthly/weekly newsletter, put the link on your web site, advertize it internally, put it in the footer of your email .. Don’t just follow people. It’s feels like you want to stalk them.

But there is of course a cure for all those who want to follow you. If you don’t want to be followed by them you can block them from following you.

Block Twitter followers from following you

On the other hand, if you like or would like to stay in contact with the company … send them a twitt, ask them about their promotions, services, events … and wait for the answer. You might be surprised how long it takes to get it.