4 Signs Your Twitter Followers Are Bored

Working at an inbound agency, I analyze a lot of social media. As the data builds, patterns form and truths are revealed.

The unfortunate reality is that there are many bored Twitter followers out there. The good news is they are constantly dropping hints as to what they like, don’t like, and as the title suggests, they’re interest (or lack of) in what you’re saying.

Failure to act on these indicators and the results may be devastating or at the very least harmful to your inbound campaign. Recognizing them and taking the proper action will end in a much stronger, happier relationship between you and your followers.

Signs are interesting. Your tweets, not so much.

Now, signs are great when they work. They are designed to warn and inform us on the proper action to take (Think stop sign). Unfortunately, most people are terrible sign givers because they assume we understand their message (Think stop sign in a foreign language). The outcome is typically full of confusion rather than clarity.

If we lived in a perfect world, all signs would be written in the same language, but we don’t and we won’t because that would be boring and we know how bad boring is. So this means one thing; we must learn the language.

Learning, yuck I know, but these are easy to understand and even easier to act on. Plus Bob Dylan once wrote, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” (Yep, quoting Dylan. Not bad for a 26 year old). I think this is a great way to think about social media. It’s constantly evolving and once you stop growing with it, it’s over for you. Twitter and Bob Dylan, what a beautiful thing.

4 Signs You're Boring Your Twitter Following to Sleep

Sign 1: Minimal Conversation and Engagement

The purpose of social networks is to well; be social.

If you notice a total lack interaction then more often than not your followers are bored.

Now, the reason for the boredom comes down to two things. One, and sorry to have to break it to you, your tweets are uninteresting; or two, your tweets were interesting but you post the same content and your followers go right past your updates.

My best example of this has to come from a source outside of inbound marketing; my old job. Before landing at Impact, I had a job delivering groceries (talk about boring). I spent nearly 8 hours each day inside one truck. My only source of entertainment was the radio. As I’m sure you all know, the radio tends to play the same 4 or 5 songs over and over and over again. Well once I got beyond the madness of the situation, I started to just  tune it out. The music was there but I wasn’t listening. Eventually, I switched to talk radio and audiobooks to get the variety, information, and entertainment I needed.

So go beyond the 3 or 4 topics and switch it up before your audience switches on you.

Sign 2: No Retweets

It’s important to remember that content is king even at 140 characters.

So you have to ask yourself, does my reader care about this and more importantly, will their audience care about this?

The purpose of retweeting, from an inbound standpoint, is to add value, create credibility and drive traffic.

A little pet peeve of mine is when I see Tweets that have just the title of the blog. For me, Twitter and all social media should be like blogs and have that touch of personality from the writer.

So by all means, add a link to your blog but add you to the post at well. This will give your updates so much more quality and done right will increase your retweets and your followers interest.

Sign 3: Website Traffic is Stagnant 

As I said in sign two, the purpose of social media is to ultimately drive traffic back to your website. And lets face it, if no one is looking and no one is clicking then no one is going to your website.

To me, website traffic is a great indicator.

All of your inbound marketing is built around driving people to your site. If this is not happening, you can test out theories as to why traffic has been down and get to the root of the issue. Maybe your blogging has been less effective; or your product is seasonal and its the nature of the industry; or maybe your Twitter following is bored and not clicking on your links.

If there is one place to start your search, website traffic is it.

Sign 4: Unfollow (Boring your followers to death)

In sign one, I told you how I eventually switched from top 40 radio to audiobooks.

I pretty much unfollowed the radio.

I reached the point where it no longer provided me with entertainment and actually made me miserable. Don’t let your Twitter feed get to this point because once you lose someone, it’s almost impossible to get them back.

That’s one less possible lead and one less person to share your content. That means you’re not losing one person; you’re potentially losing thousands.

Of the 4 signs, this one is the most devastating to your overall inbound marketing campaign.

The Wake-Up

So there they are, 4 signs that your Twitter followers are bored out of their skulls.

Remember signs are fickle so despite all of my research there is a chance I missed a few. I’d love to hear some insight from all of you. So comment below if any come to mind.

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