How to Protect Your Twitter Reputation

It doesn’t take a lot to ruin your Twitter reputation.

One badly worded tweet, a lapse in judgement or a tweet in haste could bring everything you’ve worked hard to achieve crashing down around you.

To help you stay on the straight and narrow, here are a few tips on how to keep your Twitter reputation intact.

1. Verify

Your reputation as a reliable source of information is precious, so guard it with your life. Before you RT anything, always check the source to make sure it’s a genuine article.

If your followers click on a broken link, or worse a dodgy one, it could do untold damage to your rep.

2. Relationships

How many times have you seen businesses on Twitter just slamming out ‘by now’ tweets and nothing else? Annoying aren’t they?

Building relationships must be your first concern on Twitter if you don’t want to be seen as a spammer.

Take me for example; I won’t put out a tweet saying ‘buy my copywriting services now’, instead I tweet about things that are happening, put out links to my blogs and retweet stuff I find interesting that I think my followers might like too. For me, Twitter is about chatting, making new friends and helping those who are looking for advice.

3. Respond

Many of your customers will use Twitter as a way of getting hold of you because it’s quick. But that means you must respond quickly. Taking days to reply to a tweet isn’t good enough. Your Twitter account must be monitored at all times so you can act quickly when you have to.

4. Consistency

Tweeting once in a blue moon isn’t going to work. If you want to build relationships and a following, you must come up with a tweeting schedule and stick to it. Sending out a barrage of tweets once every few months just won’t cut it. You need to be seen daily (if at all possible).

5. Critics

Sorry, but there are people out there who are not going to like what you sell or say. But don’t get defensive and don’t let yourself get drawn into a Twitter spat. Respond quickly to any derogatory tweets in a positive way and state facts and your opinion clearly. If you have made an error apologise immediately to diffuse the situation and, if you can, put it right.

Other followers will be watching how you deal with the situation.

6. Automation

I’m not adverse to automation per se, but keep it to a minimum. Your followers will want to know that there is a real person behind your Twitter account. By all means have your blog posts automatically go out, but make sure there are also live tweets too.

Most of that is common sense, but it never hurts to reiterate it now and then.

Your Twitter reputation is precious so make sure you take care of it.

Author: Sally Ormond