Author: Chris Herbert, B2B Specialist & Founder of mi6
Audience: Business Executives and Marketing Leaders
For the past few days I’ve been conducting a Twitter experiment. I do these in order to test theories and satisfy my curiosity. I pass on what I learn to clients, my followers and readers so they can benefit from my successes and failures. It can be a bit risky but better me than Mi6 clients.
The Experiment
I jury rigged an automated tweet to be sent out every four hours that featured an article that had the keyword search term “b2B marketing” in it. Here’s the tweet I sent out giving my followers a heads up.
What Happened
Two things happened: 1) I lost followers and, 2) the tweets sucked.
When I asked my followers if they minded my sending auto tweets out; six of them did and they unfollowed me. Nine unfollowed me when they read my first automated tweet. (I used TweetEffect to find this out).
Ok, I lost some followers, this happens regularly. What about the quality of the content being auto tweeted? Was it any good? Did it provide value? Let’s take a look at some of the beauts that went out.
This tweet below has nothing to do with B2B marketing. In fact it’s not an article but a press release regarding a mobile B2B application that allows traders to get insights on the “health of their trading community transactions” using a mobile device. My followers would not be impressed, I sure wasn’t!
Take a look at this tweet! I would never send a tweet worded this way. I’d rephrase it. A great example where you need to be careful when putting your tweets in the hands of the automatons.
And finally, does this tweet make any sense to you? It’s a partial sentence! It’s not brief, to the point and doesn’t convey any value. It’s pretty much a dumb tweet.
Experiment Conclusion
- After 24 hours I learned enough and shut it down
- My tweets are carefully written, selected, shared and tightly focused around B2B marketing and social media. I try to act as an intelligent filter and reporter. Automation cannot replace the intelligence I put in selecting and sending tweets
- I must protect my followers from noise and provide quality content. Content that I’ve created or curated. Content that helps my followers be successful
- I can’t remove myself from the tweeting process which includes finding/creating content and sharing it. I need to act as an editor to ensure what I tweet is something that meets my standards and provides value to my followers
Do you have any ideas where automated tweeting makes sense and provides value? Share your ideas below.
Other Posts That May Be Interesting
- How Do I know if Someone is Following Me on Twitter?
- Should You Bulk Follow On Twitter?
- How To Put Together a Great Tweet
- How To Track Tweeted Links Using Bitly
About the Author
Chris Herbert is the founder of Mi6. Mi6 is a B2B (Business to Business) marketing agency and network dedicated to helping companies build their brands and develop commercial relationships. He is the founder of ProductCamp Toronto and the new Hi-tech “unassociation” Silicon Halton. He tweets under the handle @B2Bspecialist
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Great article, if you remember the Microsoft bing adverts on the ‘what has information overload done to us’ I think that situation in the ad perfectly describes automated tweeting: your friend (follower) is there for an engaging conversation but you are just randomly saying useless pieces of information at them.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for your experiment & for reporting the outcome!
I think this phrase is key to what you discovered: “I try to act as an intelligent filter and reporter”. Context is so important for content to have any meaning. Even implicitly, the tweeter is providing context simply from the person’s identity, professional behavior, expertise, choices of topic – all of which speak to your final point: “I can’t remove myself from the tweeting process”.
BTW I could be the person who retweeted the Sterling Commerce story
– I’m always interested in B2B data exchange vendors because of my data integration background. Since I consider you a trusted source, it didn’t even occur to me that the story was out of your subject matter area. So, at times, the value of content will also arise from the tweet viewer’s context (POV) as well.
It’s all of the above that makes the Twitter forum so interesting and sometimes even complex.
Cheers,
Julie