Business Insight Zone

I’ve explained before why using automatic direct messages (DMs) on Twitter is often a bad idea. But since I wrote my initial post on the subject, I’ve softened my view. Some people use auto-DMs as a simple way to convey a friendly hello. Maybe the gesture is a little empty, but I can live with it.

Others immediately ask me to click on their link, join them on Facebook, buy their product, or whatever. These folks I often unfollow, depending on how egregiously self-serving or irrelevant they are.

Others have offered — sometimes in patronizing language — to help me understand Twitter better (I’ve got the hang of it, thanks), to explain the basics of Internet marketing (i.e. my day job) to me, to share their wisdom about using social media for business (already swimming through more of that than I can handle), or the like.

And then there are the pure head-scratchers. This week I got a friendly auto-DM that started with “Hello and thanks for following me!” Okay — no harm, no foul. Then it said . . .

“Where can I find out more about you?”

?!?

Anytime you see someone’s Twitter handle in a public tweet or DM, you can click on it to see their Twitter profile, including name, location, Web address, and a short biography. Mind you, when I say “short” biography, I mean 160 characters. You can digest it in an instant.

Here’s what it says on the profile page for the @Hoovers account:

Name Hoover’s
Location Austin, TX
Web http://www.hoovers.com/
Bio The top business information provider in the world, represented on Twitter by blogger Tim Walker and communications chief Adam Hanin.

Seems pretty clear, right? And if you read this blog without following us on Twitter, please be assured that I’m aggressive about  flogging promoting all the posts here (along with Hoover’s webinars, special promotions, Bizmology posts, etc.) in our Twitter stream.

In other words, it’s quite easy to find out more about Hoover’s via our Twitter bio or tweets, and distressingly easy to find out more about me personally by the merest glance at the tweets leading to this blog.

Are we a special case? Not at all. Most people using Twitter, especially for business, link their Twitter stream clearly to a company site, blog, LinkedIn account, or what-have-you. Twitter, I’m hardly the first to point out, is for oversharing.

And yet I regularly receive auto-DMs like the one I’m quoting, which suggest not only a degree of laziness (take a second to look me up yourself, couldja?), but also of cluelessness (uh, you do know the information you seek is only a click away, right?).

The moral of the story, in bullet points:

• Read your auto-DM message again.
• Friendly is good; patronizing isn’t.
• Please don’t ask a favor from the get-go.
• Consider that your opening conversational salvo might come across as, for lack of a better word, stupid.

Happy tweeting!

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Related post:

• What Works Better than an Auto-DM.

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Photo by Peter Sandford, used under a CC-Share Alike license.