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Your Transparency on Twitter
AUTO-TWEETING OR ABSENT tweeting is the ability to send tweets out without your having to do it manually. There are a variety of web sites and services that allow you to ghost tweet. People who argue in favor of these say that it allows them to keep a presence in the social media area even though they might be too busy, sleeping, or even while on stage speaking. When I polled a bunch of my followers about their thoughts of people using automated tweets, the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Twitter is unique. People feel that when they see a tweet from your account that you are actually the person writing it at that time. Not to mention that if you use a tweet system that is sent out when you’re not there, what you’re saying to your followers is that you’re only on there to talk and not listen.
An example of this was when I saw a well-known speaker who I knew was on a cruise for a week with no Internet access tweeting out a pitch for his upcoming workshop. People saw the tweet and replied and asked him specific questions about the workshop because they were interested in potentially attending. And nothing. No reply from him until five days later when he returned from the cruise. When people asked why it took him so long to reply he said, “Sorry, I was on a cruise for a week without access,” which then led to the logical follow-up question: If you had no access, how did you tweet about your workshop in the first place? You see what can happen here? If you want to build a presence in the social media platform, then you need to be present.
In addition to absent tweeting, some people also use their assistant to tweet on their behalf, pretending to be them. Although potentially efficient, this method again hurts the transparency and the authenticity of your account. Your followers think that they are speaking to you. People get really upset with this technique for a good reason. You cannot, for the sake of automation, outsource your relationship building. Of all the areas of business, this is really the number one thing that a business owner should not be delegating to someone else. You wouldn’t send your assistant to go have coffee with somebody and pretend to be you.107 And you wouldn’t hire an actor to go and play you at a networking event.108
Please understand that this is not an argument about efficiency. Most people, including myself, do not have an issue if multiple people tweet from the same account as long as it’s disclosed in the bio. Guy Kawasaki created quite a stir when he admitted in an interview that his Twitter account was run by three other people as well as him. He then changed his bio afterward to disclose that other people also tweet from his account. Although that seems to be gone now as well. You can run multiperson accounts and simply add the initials to the end of the tweets. This way the readers will know that what they are reading may not be written by the main person on the account. This allows for the efficiency of a multiperson account while still being transparent.
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