Friday 30 May 2014

Too many #hours in the day?


The phenomenon of local #hours on Twitter has increased steadily over the last couple of years. It's a great idea and I use appropriate geographical and subject themed #hours for my own business and for my clients.

There comes a point, however, where several #hours coincide or follow on from one another. At this point I'm seeing the same tweet from people 4 or 5 times in a couple of minutes - each with a different #hour on it. This is then repeated every 10 minutes until the #hour is over. This makes for very repetitive and boring content! It's also a wasted opportunity in my opinion.

I had a debate with a particularly enthusiastic #hour frequenter. Their response to their followers that were getting bored with all the "noise" they were generating was...

...use the mute feature.

Really!?!

Do you really want to be the account that encourages your followers to mute your output? Seems like an exercise in self defeat to me!

Using loads of scheduled tweets to cover multiple hours may seem like a cost effective solution, but you'll soon hit a brick wall. I think that a training company local to me summed it up nicely:


Well said...!

The other major issue with #hours is over zealous retweeting. You've probably come across the "retweet everything that moves to try and get new followers" gambit. It can create just as much noise as the sales tweets. If you want to curate good content for your followers to keep them engaged then you don't want them turning off your retweets on your profile page.


Here are 3 top tips to keep you involved with your #hour of choice without boring the rest of your followers:

1. Interact with people on your #hour of choice (i.e. start your tweet with an @)  You're still visible on the hashtag and it limits the #hour fatigue generated amongst the rest of your followers.

2. Retweet selectively. Target businesses that are good suppliers/clients or ones that you'd like to talk to. Or, of course, tweets that say something relevant to your followers' interests!

3. Looking desperate is not a good sales tactic. Concentrate your efforts on a couple of #hours and try actually talking to people instead of just broadcasting. You'll get better results.




TL;DR
Don't annoy the followers you've already got.