We have all known for a long time that dealerships must be careful about the quantity of posts they publish on their Facebook pages. Inundating a Facebook user’s News Feed with content – even quality content – can easily get you hidden. Facebook users primarily want to use the social network to find out what’s going on with their networks, not your dealership (or business). Getting “hidden” on Facebook is like the kiss of death for any Facebook page. The problem with being hidden is that the Facebook user technically still “likes” your page but they will never see any of your content without directly navigating to your page after hiding you. In addition, as the admin for a Facebook page, you’ll never know who has hidden you or who has not. With Facebook reach continuing to decrease, it’s imperative that you try to avoid being hidden. This has always been true but is getting increasingly important.
According to a report by TechCrunch, Twitter is introducing a “mute” feature which they are going to start rolling out immediately to all users. This feature will allow a Twitter user to basically “hide” any users tweets without having to unfollow them. In the past, unfollowing someone “could” put a user in a precarious position when choosing how to deal with that co-worker or peer who incessantly tweets and/or clogs up your Twitter stream.
A Twitter user essentially had only a few choices when deciding how to deal with this:
- They could unfollow that person/company.
- They could create “lists” of people they really want to listen to and exclude those Twitter-hogs.
- They could put up with it.
Depending on who the Twitter account spamming your news feed is, unfollowing them may bring up uncomfortable and/or awkward conversations in the future. Going with the second option took a little more Twitter knowledge and/or effort than many users have. So, until now, many people just put up with it.
Not any longer.
In the past, users have employed many methods of populating their Twitter feeds through automation – RSS feeds, Facebook posts being sent straight to Twitter, and other software and apps that throw content onto your Twitter account. While many people use Twitter for different purposes than they would Facebook, the one commonality that they share is that NOBODY wants to look at their Facebook News Feed or Twitter stream and see one account monopolizing it. This is especially true if it’s obviously automated content.
Twitter users and marketers would be wise to examine their Twitter content posting strategy for both quality and quantity to ensure that they are providing useful information and interaction with their followers. If you’re simply pushing content via automated streams, posting links to your inventory pages and/or “for sale” messages, continuously soliciting your product or service or posting large quantities of syndicated content, you are in danger of being “muted”. I believe that once this feature is completely rolled out and the Twitter-verse learns how to use this feature (which is not difficult) that they will eagerly (and with great satisfaction) quickly “mute” those accounts that have been annoying them. And, just like Facebook, you’ll never know who has muted you.
My advice: Make sure that you append every content share with some sort of comment or indicator that shows other users that it was NOT an automated tweet. Make sure to use tools like Buffer or third-party software in which you can schedule content like Hootsuite to ensure that your content is spread out and not all clumped together and/or posted all at once. Make sure to also include original and relevant content as well. People followed you for a reason, make sure you know what your audience wants to hear and deliver.
Twitter now has a kiss of death. Do your best to make sure that your customers don’t choose to use it.
