The secret to my (alleged) Twitter “success” revealed

There’s nothing like tweeting about blogging and blogging about tweeting to beat a dead horse into the ground, eh?

Guess what?

I’m doing it anyway.

Last week a friend messaged me on BlackBerry messenger about something, I don’t remember the exact context, but somewhere along the line I decided to send him a link in a direct message (DM) via Twitter, and realized he wasn’t following me. So I asked him why, and he said he was “trying a different approach to his Twitter strategy” and he unfollowed a lot of people in order to reduce the noise in his stream. His logic was that if he wanted to talk to me, see what was up with me lately, etc., we’re connected on Facebook and of course, BlackBerry messenger.

I can respect that.

However, it spurned an interesting conversation about “Twitter strategies.” People put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to best use this tiny tool of epic proportions. Ari Herzog has been experimenting with it and documenting his findings, which, from an analytical perspective, is very interesting.

People ask me what my Twitter strategy is quite a bit. To my knowledge, I’ve never really divulged the details of what it is in writing, until now.

Are you ready? After the jump, you’ll find out my own personal Twitter strategy. (If you came here on a direct link, you won’t see the “Read more” thing.)

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What to do when “you’re doing it wrong” goes wrong

Let’s face it — social media consultants/strategists/ninjas/experts/jedis/gurus/swamis/mavens/ringmasters/highpriestesses/whatevers are know-it-alls, even when, as I and many others have pointed out, nobody can possibly know it all. Yet deep down, we (and I say “we” because I admit that yes, I do fall into that sweeping category of “social media people”) really just want to help people who aren’t necessarily the nerds that we are.

Many times, we’re successful and people are glad that we were there to help them out, answer questions, and give them some guidance.

Other times, not so much.

Sometimes, you can reach out to an organization that you care deeply about and offer your help, and give them your time and help, and they won’t acknowledge it. If they acknowledge it, they won’t appreciate it, or they won’t understand why what you’re trying to help them with is important, until their peers are suddenly moving in on the game.

When that happens, it becomes an issue of “keeping up with the Joneses,” and said organization will decide that they have to have all the same tools that they hear about on TV, that their competitors are using, that they feel like they should be using because well, everybody else is and ooh — shiny objects! Never will they stop to assess what their overall goals are, who their audience is, if their target market is even using said tools — they’ll have no sense of strategy whatsoever.

Sometimes, no matter what you say to people, it’s not going to resonate.

No matter if you tell them that there are only 5 people in the entire region active on Twitter (and you know because you’ve met all of them), they’re still going to think they need a Twitter account to “reach out to their local audience.”

It’s not going to matter that you know they need a Facebook page and not a Facebook group to accomplish what they want to do — if they won’t listen to you, if they insist on “doing it wrong,” you can try to convince them that they’re “doing it wrong” until you’re blue in the face.

Sometimes, people aren’t going to listen. And you know what?

You’ve got to let it go.

Walk away. You tried. That’s all you can do.

If people insist on “doing it wrong” — it won’t do you any good to kick and scream.

Sometimes, you have to let people do things “the hard way,” otherwise they’ll never learn.

I’ve learned to do more things “the hard way” in my life than I’d like to admit, but my stubbornness has subsided in recent years. I’ve learned that it’s much easier to keep your mouth shut and ears open if you want to learn something the “easy way.”

But you know what?

Not everybody knows that.

So you have to just walk away and hold your head high knowing that you tried.

(Ever had that kind of situation?)