Interior Designers: 5.5 BAD Ways To Twitter And NOT Make Money

Love it or loathe it Twitter is here to stay.

Many interior designers just can’t take Twitter seriously as a business tool. Until recently I was a dissenter too; I’ll tell you about my epiphany in a moment, but it just seemed plain wrong that the self-obsessed media could be right about something they love, for once. And it just made matters worse when Oscar Wilde’s famous phrase “The Witterings Of A Wit” could oh so easily be changed to “The Twitterings Of A Twit”. And then I was further annoyed because everyone says that that was an Oscar Wilde quote and yet Wikipedia said it wasn’t  (so it can’t be one of his). And then, really anyway, it should be the “Tweets Of A Twit” and that’s just silly.

And then I calmed down a bit and thought rationally.

Twitter is just a bit of technology with a silly name, we must all agree on that as a starting point. But if, for little or no cost and effort, I can get more potential clients to visit my blog or my web site by using Twitter occasionally then who is the Twit…my competitor who uses it? or me, who doesn’t?

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Then Ceil Petrucelli commented on one of my blog posts saying that one of her friends had tweeted my post and here she was reading it and, in the post-modern vernacular, loving it. She’d never heard of KOTHEA fabrics before. So some other kind person had been doing my marketing for me, which is great, but I felt that maybe I should be making more of an effort myself. And then I realised that I was writing yet another blog post and I was anti-blogs a year ago! Did that make me a Twitter-blog tweeting, blogging hypocrite? (My surname is Seuss, by the way).

But is it easy? Well, from a technical viewpoint I’m sure you can automatically generate a tweet from most blog posts or from within Facebook. So we can probably all produce Twitter output SOMEWHERE in our digital marketing without any ongoing additional effort. (In fact this post has been automatically tweeted, apparently).

So  I’m going to make an effort and start to use the KOTHEA Twitter Feed/Page thing that I had already set up some months ago; just in case I  might need it. In fact I’m already doing it because, as I said, I made it automatic.

Having done my extensive research on how to Twitter and how not to, I thought I would share it with you and also tell you what the “Lazy Marketer” would do to get the most ‘bangs for the least bucks/time’. So now you too can avoid the “5 & A Half Ways That Interior Designers Twitter Badly”. Without further ado they are:

First: By not knowing your goal. Are you on Twitter to socialize or to make money? Each has a different approach and knowing what you want in advance can save you precious time and energy when incorporating Twitter into your marketing plan. (The lazy marketer will just automate Twitter and forget about Twitter goals)

Second: By following everyone that follows you. Don’t, all you should do when you are notified about a new follower is to look at their profile to see if they are worth following back. Don’t follow everyone that follows you, what is the point?  (The lazy marketer would not even check who is following them, they would set the options in Twitter to ensure that they are not notified about new followers).

Third: By worrying about how many people are following you. Don’t worry, it is obviously better to have a small number of quality followers than thousands of poor quality followers but it is notoriously difficult to ascertain quality. (The lazy marketer would not even know where to get this information, let alone worry about it).

Fourth: By spamming your new followers. Don’t use Twitter’s Auto Response to welcome them; apparently most people find this kind of Twitter-spam annoying. (The lazy marketer never spams, it takes up too much time)

Fifth: By spending lots of money to make Twitter look nice. Don’t, most people will see THEIR background when reading your tweets, so there is very little point in paying for nice graphics linked to your Twitter account. (The lazy marketer certainly wouldn’t spend extra money here)

Fifth & A Half: By not Twittering at all. Don’t Not Twitter – Do Twitter. (The lazy marketer Twitters automatically)

Having hopefully got past those double negatives, here are some other thoughts. How about:

a. Add a “Share on Twitter” button to your web site? When you see my appear on the right-hand column of this blog or KOTHEA’s web page ask me and I’ll tell you how.

b. Monitor what people are saying about your company on Twitter. You can use an RSS feed from the Twitter search engine to do this look at this link <<here>> which tells me when ANYONE mentions KOTHEA on Twitter.

c. I’m not an interior designer and so I don’t sell to the public. If I were an interior designer selling to the general public I would probably quickly get Twitter ticked off on my to-do list investing a couple of hours of my time at most and then put MUCH more effort onto a Facebook fan page …but that’s another post.

d. I’ve become reconciled to Twitter because it just seems like publicising my site another way with little additional effort.

e. In a way, a Twitter feed can be similar to receiving a summarised electronic newsletter. Many people prefer to receive information on their mobile/cell phones in that short, tweet-like-format ie where Twitter works well – I realise that people are different from me and that is what underlies marketing – understanding that difference and catering to it.

If you enjoyed this then <<here>> are some similar articles to this for you to enjoy. The buttons below let you share this with others as does the ‘addthis’ button on the right-hand menu.