5 Good Reasons Why No One Will Follow You on Twitter!

The quick and dirty on why no one is following you on Twitter!

1.  You’re posts don’t contain anything of value. Harsh sounding, I know, but positive, life affirming, happiness quotes are fine once in awhile but unless you are a life coach by trade, they get old fast and may cause someone who is having a bad day to block you.

2. There’s no there, there. Where are your tweets? You have to tweet something worthwhile every now and then or you will lose your audience. You can schedule tweets with an application like Hootsuite or TweetDeck. Perfectly legit.  Just don’t give up or complain that it doesn’t work if you aren’t willing to invest the time to make it work. Not to evoke Herman Cain, but think 3-3-3-3. Tweet:

• 3-5 times a day at the very least least – (many say 3x/hr, but I’m assuming you have a life and a business to attend to).
• 1/3 casual conversation
• 1/3 about your business
• 1/3 about your industry

3. You’re not reaching your audience. After you’ve considered the quality of your content for your intended audience, my advice is to experiment with timing. Try tweeting at 7AM, 9AM, 11AM, 1PM, 3PM, 5PM, 7PM and 9PM and see what the response is.  An infographic from the KISSmetrics blog,  found that:

• The best time to tweet is 5PM ET
• 1 to 4 tweets per hour is ideal
• The best days to tweet are midweek and on the weekends

4.Your Twitter profile and background design aren’t serving you well. It could be you have no icon (photo or logo) and the Twitter “egg” marks you as either a newbie with no identity. Who wants to tweet with “anonymous?” Your background is a turn-off with a lame image tiled across the page. Your bio is wishy-washy or worse, non-existent. If you choose to use Twitter, consider it a part of your brand identity and design it that way.

5. Your following to follower ratio marks you as a spammer or newbie. I understand the desire to follow all the cool kids when you start with Twitter, but for the sake of appearances, try following a few people who will follow you back and build that up a bit before you go wild with following others. You’ll notice that the number of people who follow you will change daily as people clean up their accounts, often deleting accounts who don’t post often enough, those who annoy them for the reasons I mentioned in #1 and those were following an account due to a topical event, e.g., Arab Spring, earthquake, political scandal, etc. Don’t take it personally and don’t feel the need to have thousands of followers. I prefer quality to quantity. Following too many people clogs up the flow of information that I value on Twitter.

So, do you agree with me or am I full of it? Let me know. I’ll take no comments as an affirmation of my eternal wisdom.