This is really a great thing. Brands on Twitter rely heavily on DM’s to exchange confidential information like phone numbers, passwords and email ID’s with customers. However the process was always cumbersome because Twitter only allowed people to exchange DM’s if they followed each other. From a process flow what it meant was:

• A user would first follow the brand
• User would have to message the brand to follow them back
• Brand would need to follow the user
• User then sends a DM and the conversation would take place securely
• Once the issue is resolved many brands would want to unfollow the user to limit the number of people they follow to keep their follower credibility high. (In part this is because of the rampant use of auto follow settings and bots to grow follower bases by many social media agencies)
• It becomes quite a task to locate and unfollow the user
• Many users see this as “insulting” and this act of unfollowing often creates ill will for the brand

There was no way around this till recently we discovered that @tatadocomo Twitter settings page had a new option to let any follower DM the brand. We quickly checked some other brands we manage on Twitter like Redbull and Maruti Ritz and realized that this was available only to Verified accounts.

We opted for this option and tested it and found it to work like a charm.

So now all a user has to do to DM @tatadocomo is follow the brand.

Thank you Twitter for orienting yourself to businesses. When brands start getting aggressive on Twitter that’s when the tipping point for the service would come. Meanwhile do let us know what other features Twitter should introduce to make it more brand friendly

In recent times I was amazed at the kind of fake numbers game that many agencies resort to, to justify the money they charge for social media marketing. All SMM professionals would know the cheap tricks that an agency can employ to make the client feel “happy”, however most self respecting social media agencies would rather be sacked than resort to such tactics.

I am of course assuming that this post is being read by an unsuspecting client who was thrilled with the few hundred followers on twitter overnight with the “twitter default profile image” – so here’s your reality check. If you are social media professional I hope you will not resort to any of the below tactics. After all cheating cant get you long term clients, so better not try. In this part I shall delve on Twitter (hope to cover Facebook in a following post)

To illustrate this let me take the real world case study of Uninor (mobile services) on Twitter

Twitter Alert 1 – Followers with no profile image

If you are seriously on Twitter, and I mean seriously you will have spent enough time selecting your profile image. Now imagine if your brand page has a lot of followers who would rather be birds in different colours what would it say about them? If you did count 89 of 358 followers did not have a profile picture.

Twitter Alert 2 – Followers with no activity

Ok so lets take the above example screengrab furtherand look at the profiles of AMALKALRA and raviteja032. AMALKALRA has no tweets follows only Uninor! raviteja032 is even better with no tweets and only following Uninor! Now ask yourself what your brand needs to do to get such die hard followers who are not interested in anything else in the world.

Twitter Alert 3 – Followers who create accounts very close to each other

Taking the same example above it transpires that AMALKALRA and raviteja032 created Twitter accounts within a day of each other (we are not saying they can’t be genuine Uninor fanatics but… )

That’s it for this part, we will carry on the series of what to watch out for when the report card comes in each month.