I was reading my Twitter feed last night and I came upon the following Tweet:
For every RT, we’ll pledge 1 minute of hilarity during #ComedyWeek. Please RT. This needs to be funny.
It was posted by YouTube @youtube if you’d like to follow them. And I thought about the terrible obviousness of their statement, “This needs to be funny.” They want a large number of people to retweet them (RT). They are promoting their comedy week. And I wonder if what got tweeted was actually the instructions to the social media person: the information about minutes of hilarity, and the instruction to be funny. That would make sense.
Otherwise it would be hard to comprehend why a big business like YouTube did not have the sense to make that a humorous post. If the post itself was funny, you wouldn’t have to ask people to retweet it. That is the part that is obvious and yet many people miss it. You have 140 characters on Twitter, use it wisely. If it is funny, valuable, useful or heart-touching people will retweet it.
There is a local business that has read some social media book that told them, “put a face on your business, get people to know your employees and build a sense of community.” And so this misguided business dutifully tweets out meaningless content every day that reads like this, “OurBusiness StaffMinute meet Jack our janitor. Jack is 40 with two kids. Hi Jack!” Tomorrow they will feature their bookkeeper. That’s sad. They get the concept that their community needs to get to know them, but they have absolutely no idea of what to do and how to do it so the tweets roll on, one a day.
Or, take the gal who went to a convention recently. She spent all day at an information-packed and fun place and her tweet said, “I am at Convention, tweeting.” With a picture of a crowded trade show floor. No insightful info on what businesses were represented there, or what amazing new business she had just discovered, no end of show summary of what she gained by attending. One tweet, no real information.
Don’t do it. When you type a tweet stop and think:
Is there valuable content?
Was it said in an interesting manner?
Would I want to read this tweet if it showed up in my news feed?
Is this something my followers care about and would retweet?
If the answer is no, take your hands off the keyboard.