Twitter: you're doing it wrong

Yesterday I saw a blog post by a fellow Etsy seller in which she gave detailed instructions on how to have your Twitter feed automatically update with your shop listings.

I follow a few people who do this. I don't know why they do it, nor why I continue to follow them.

Imagine this: you're at a cocktail party meeting new people, exchanging some witty banter, and chattering away happily.

Then a new person arrives and all they do is plug their business. They don't care about what you have to say: they just want to repeat news of their GREAT DEALS and NEW INVENTORY and the like.

That's when you ignore them and hope they'll go away, right?

Twitter is like that cocktail party.

Twitter does not need to be spammed with automated bullshit. By subjecting your Twitter followers to this crap, you are:

• Boring the pants off your followers
  
• Alienating your current and potential customers
• Wasting a perfectly good opportunity to use Twitter to have interesting conversations, gather useful information (Twitter is like a free focus group) and handle customer service inquiries
• Wasting a good opportunity to show your customers our human side - which, after all, is the whole reason they're following you on Twitter
• Wasting other people's time
• Adding spam to an Internet that has plenty of spam already, thanks

Talk about mundane stuff all you want: your baby, your dog, what you ate for breakfast. That stuff, at least, can be the start of a conversation. And it reassures people that you are, in fact, a person and not some sort of robot. Hell, talk about the process of making stuff and selling it. We're all waiting on stories of creativity and glue gun accidents (especially glue gun accidents). Maybe once in a while, have a bitchin' contest or promotion (note: that is not the same as yelling FREE SHIPPING FREE SHIPPING at your followers every five seconds).

So, my plea is this: keep Twitter random and noncommercial. Don't fuck it up with your spammy nonsense. You're only losing business, bub. Actually, I would really love to hear the story of someone - anyone - who has gotten a single sale from doing this.

By the way, follow me on Twitter if you want to argue about this. Arguing 140 characters at a time is one of my many talents.