5 Reasons You Should Auto DM New Followers
Twitter has now been around for five years now. Long enough, in my opinion, for people to get it. Twitter is engagement, not another place to put your billboard up. Auto DM’s for me can be a deal breaker. It’s kinda like that guy who gives you his unsolicited business card upon meeting you for the first time. Automatically, I am not going to use his service, and I will probably unfollow you on the spot.
These are the last few DM’s I’ve received.
Need design & illustration for flyers, brochures & more, website design & build, SEO, branding & corporate ID? visit www.somjunk.com
Appreciate the follow. Got a minute, check out my digital sketchbook. Tons of awesome! www.doubtitstatawesome.com
Thanks for connecting. We do stickers for any occasion. Check us out here www.nothanks.com
Interested? Check out what we can for you on facebook! www.nevercheckingyouout.com
To me this is the epitome of non-engagement. Yet there are those who think that auto DM’s are a good thing, a highly useful tool. I’ve come up with my five best reasons to use auto DM’s.
- I’m lazy
- I really don’t care about engaging my audience, but I really want to appear like I do.
- I don’t know the difference between door to door sales and proper internet marketing, and I don’t care to learn.
- I find Twitter to be a great resource to push my product on you, every single chance I get.
- I’m so dull that I cannot find anything original to say to you upon meeting you.
So if any of these are you, please feel free to continue your auto DM’s. Just don’t expect me to follow you.
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Well said Brian. It’s all about connecting with people.
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I really think many people see this as a quick solution towards extending their reach. But they don’t realize they are keeping people away.
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Agreed. It’s become more of an annoyance.
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Brian, I’m going to do an experiment to see what works with Twitter DMs. For the past few months I have used auto-DMs as a way to start conversations with people. I have been tracking what works and what doesn’t. Overall my website gets unique visits from Twitter that equals 20-25% of all new followers. So the way I see it, DMs are adding to a 20-25% click-thru rate plus creating conversations with many people. While clicks don’t translate into friendships nor sales, the experiment is to see if not using auto-DMs is actually hindering how I attract people. The experiment is as follows. I will turn off my auto-DMs today (5/9/11), post tweets to my account more often (more tweets, less DMs) and measure the results in a week (5/17/2011). I’ll repost the results here for everyone to see.
Personally, I don’t mind getting DMs from people… it helps me focus in on who they are and decide if I want to engage with them or not. A good DM should appeal to the person who chose to follow you, otherwise, why are they following you?? I don’t have time to read every new follower’s profile or track down their site, so DMs are more efficient to weed out the good from bad. It’s not unlike signing up for a newsletter… I expect to hear from someone I follow, and think others expect to hear from me. Of course I don’t want to be sold on anything either thus many DMs are ineffective at best. Plus, for all your efforts, people will continue to use DMs to introduce themselves after a follow… But, we’ll see what the stats indicate in a week!
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Please post the results here. I’ll be very interested to see how that goes. One question, do you plan on interacting more or simply tweeting your site more? By interacting, I mean talking about anything else other than your site.
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Results from my test!
After a week of auto-DM silence, I have observed the following results across three Twitter accounts. Although I had intended on posting more tweets during this period (about things I care about, not promoting myself other than blog articles I publish) I was unable to due to time constraints. So these results are largely based on just being present on Twitter, following more people, retweeting interesting posts, and replying to incoming messages or conversations I was already having (most of my conversations are DMs since people start DMs with me first).
Google Analytics:
Traffic to my site, linked from my Twitter account, stayed the same! It appears that the auto-DMs may not have been increasing my traffic. It’s too hard to say if the auto-DMs were creating traffic and simultaneously turning people away, but I’m getting the same amount of traffic from Twitter so it appears that auto-DMs don’t help traffic, per se.
Follower Rate:
A clear indicator is the rate in which I’m being followed. While the account I spend the least time on and has the fewest followers stayed flat (growth rate didn’t fluctuate), my two more active accounts saw big increases in follower rates. Follower rates increased by 19.2% and 33.9% (where the follower count is over 6,000 and 4,000 respectively).
My Analysis
No activity on social media should be done without a goal in mind. My goals are simple – gain followers and drive social media-derived traffic towards my blog and website. Turning off auto-DMs supports these goals.
If your goal is to sell something, build friendships, influence politics, etc, then you should evaluate how you use Twitter to achieve those specific goals. I’m not offended by other’s auto-DMs and feel that those who are should have policies of unfollowing those people. Ultimately, know why you’re using Twitter and use your judgment towards achieving your purpose.
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
My other goal is to always improve, hence why I did this test. What’s working for you and how could I achieve my goals more easily (without increasing my workload)?
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Wow Richard! That is an amazing little study you did. Thank you so much for that info. I have found a few things along the way that have helped. First and foremost interaction. Like I keep saying, it’s a cocktail party, so jump in and have some fun. Sharing valuable, original content. Follow back your Retweeters and thank them. And oddly enough, retweeting plenty of other’s content has had a very big impact on my counts.
Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking the time, not only run the experiment, but to come back and post your findings.
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Not sure why my avatar changed, but perhaps it’s because I used a different URL… My follow-up post is above!
-Richard Walker
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When I saw the title I was prepared to mock you in front of my Followers, but this is awesome. If only there were a pledge against AutoDMs that we could make people sign.
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Yeah, it was a bit of a bait and switch title. lol Glad you liked it
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