It occurred to me as I was sketching out this series that a few of you might actually want to know how to disengage from people, or how to engage under less pleasant circumstances than what I generally will be talking about for the next couple of months. Since I’m a giver, I wanted to make sure you would feel the love, so this post is dedicated especially to you! For those of you who still want to learn more about how to engage successfully on Social Media sites, just take the opposite of a lot of these concepts and roll with them. It should still work just fine for you.
Without further delay, then, here are 7 great ways to drive people nuts.
1. Send as many Auto DMs as possible: As my friend Gloria (@GrandmaOnDeck) noted in the comments on my last post, Auto DMs, or direct messages, can seem like a great idea when you first start out on Twitter. After all, what could be better than sending a thank you note to everyone who follows you?
Well, once you’ve been in the Twitter world for a little while, you come to understand that receiving an Auto DM is kind of like a really nice way of saying, “I almost want to engage with you, but not quite.”
If you want to drive people nuts, sending Auto DMs is a fantastic way to go. It saves time and will probably result in you having to engage with fewer people.
2. Promote yourself, your company, and your products/services once every 5-10 minutes: Even the most self-promotional people can get tired of tweeting out the same “click this link” kind of tweet, but there are lots of ways to mix it up. For example:
- Retweet every retweet you get
- Retweet every Follow Friday mention you get (if you really want to rub salt in the wounds, don’t add anything to your retweet, like “thanks.” Just hit the retweet button)
- Thank 20 people at a time for retweets so that you can show everyone, in addition to your retweets of your retweets, how often you get retweeted
3. Send links to questionable sites or content: A great way to make people want to throw pillows at you is to post a link to a site that is in poor taste, that has a lot of pop-up windows, or even better, a spam site. People will forever remember you as the person who sent them to a questionable site. Again, to drive people cashews instead of just regular nuts, make sure that your tweet in no way previews the nature of the content you’re asking them to visit. In fact, make it sound really interesting!
4. Engage in bad manners as often as possible: It sometimes is hard to discern what bad manners look like in Social Media. Here are some ideas to help you out.
- Jump into a chat and do nothing but promote yourself
- Ask people to help you out without ever returning the favor
- Saying mean stuff about people (well, that one kind of holds true in real life, too)
- Reveal secrets that have been told to you in the wide open Social Media ether
I’m sure you can get creative from that point onward.
5. Be a drama queen (or king): Oh, the drama. There are so many different ways to be overly dramatic on Social Media sites. You can be offensive when commenting on someone’s blog post. You can insist on Twitter that someone wronged you. My personal favorite is when everyone is ready to drop an issue, even admit that you are right, and yet you still keep the flames stoked. Red hot fiery drama goes so well with driving people nuts. It’s truly a match made in heaven.
6. Do not give credit where credit is due: Again, the options here are dizzying, so I’m just going to line item some ideas for you.
- Literally copy someone’s blog post and do not credit them
- Take credit for an idea that was not yours
- If you’re feeling creative, you can also turn this around a bit and credit someone with a bad idea or a misstep when it was not them (maybe it was even you!)
7. Avoid responding to people at all costs: Obviously, if you want to drive people nuts and avoid engaging with others, the simplest methodology is to just not respond. Do not answer comments on your blog posts. That’s an easy one. And on Twitter, hey, all you have to do is never visit your replies page. See no replies, respond to no replies.
Bonus information -> Number 7 can be super sweet if you add it to any of the previous steps. It’s like adding wasabi to sushi. It’s just that little extra kick that is sure to drive people bonkers.
Those are my ideas. What are your best recommendations for driving people nuts? Let’s share.
This is post number 4 in The Engagement Series. Thanks for reading!
Image by guillermo ossa. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/memoossa
View Margie Clayman's profile
I think you are giving valuable info here. Those newest to Twitter like me WANT to know the ground rules and observe them. Recently I asked someone who is really full of themselves to kindly follow back and their response was I needed to interact with them for them to follow me back. They had 30K followers yet when I looked at their profile they were not a ‘thought leader’. What was the the likelihood that we
could interact if that person is actively interacting with all those people! At 3 – 6 tweets a day they would need at least 5K days to respond to all just once! Thanks for all the valuable info…
Sorry to hear that, CW.
If you do NOT hear from a person, it can be hard to tell how they will engage with you and the rest of your community. However, if someone actually tweets and asks me to follow them, to me that is engaging. If I look at your profile and I say, “OK this person is really just trying to reach out, they’re not trying to sell me an iPad” then I would most likely follow back.
The number of followers you have does not equate to how much of a thought leader you are. That is one of the first things you learn in Twitter world.
Come find me and let me know who you are if you haven’t already. I’ll follow you back – promise 🙂
I’m with CW, being new to the twitter platform it’s hard to know the ways of twitter etiquette. Great stuff! Thank you for sharing Margie! 🙂
Glad it helped, Amy. That’s what I’m here for 🙂
Margie the blogs for new twitters is great.. It is helpful and well wriiten for many levels of readers.
I read a lot of blogs referred on twitter -it is like learning the present time 101. Keep the blogs coming.
Disappointments do come but thats how we learn. My roll models have changed. At 78 years of age I am not the teacher necessarily. I look to the bright, well educated young people to learn whats what
in this present day time. Thank You.
Thanks, Gloria. I’m sure you teach lots of people plenty – I see you engaging all of the time. But age and skill don’t really have to rely on each other. I think in the world of Twitter that may be doubly true 🙂
Great stuff Margie. All your points are wonderful. Yesterday morning I laid down 250 word comment to a post in Harvard Biz Journal. My comment was only one to two. Hard not to miss. I also followed the author on Twitter after wards.
Last night I received a DM from him saying I should comment on his latest post HBJ – the one I already commented on. The DM even said it wasn’t an auto DM. He tried sneak in a “stealth auto DM.” Oops … caught!
Needless I tossed him to the scrap him – and unfollowed him.
Argh. Isn’t that just irritating?
That’s another great argument against auto DMs though. Kind of like when you tell that first lie – it gets hard to keep up with who you are sending those things to. In cases like yours, you reveal that you are not engaging as much as you might think you are.
Sorry to hear about that.
This is a great list. All irritating and very true.
I recently ‘pruned’ my followers/following lists (who does this with so few followers?!) and discovered another AWESOME breed… Had several that I followed that I had plenty in common with… everyone THEY followed were common to both of us… they followed 300-400 more people than they had followers, yet somehow, I didn’t make the follow-back draft. Interesting.
Apparently I offend. 🙂