As a powerful tool for communications over the Web, Twitter has become quite the pop culture icon. Its millions of users range from huge celebrities and large businesses, down to startups and casual users. You have Lady Gaga and Dave Grohl addressing their fans, announcing tour dates, and showing backstage photos alongside your cousin announcing that he just had a coffee cake and whining that he didn’t get to attend San Diego Comic-Con.

And for brands using it for their online marketing campaigns, understanding and carefully planning how and when to use it can be vital. Goals can vary depending on the brand, industry and target audience, campaigns can be unique, and you may have your own restrictions to deal with.

The best thing you can do is find what works for you and your brand’s strategies and goals, and proactively implement it. It’s important to remember that there are no strict, sure-win conventions on how you can use it—just good practices to help you along the way.

However, as we come to learn of multiple ways it can be shaped to help us reach our goals, we’ll encounter and even pick-up a handful of counterproductive habits. Here are some of those less-than-desirable habits some businesses have unfortunately ended up regularly doing on Twitter.

Automated Direct Messages

It’s nice to receive a direct message right after following a brand’s Twitter. Some brands will say the usual thank yous and a warm welcome into their Twittersphere. These can be a good start in developing a good relationship between a brand and its followers—great gestures that can effectively tell followers that they are appreciated, and welcome to interact with the brand online. However, the warmth easily dissipates when you realize it was just a template created to automatically send to new followers.

Instead: Automation can kill any human quality your brand intends to embody—especially when your DMs sound very generic and lacks any personality or authenticity. It may be a few extra minutes added to your regular load, but always make sure to personalize your Welcome DMs.

Automatic Follow-Back

Measuring the number of Twitter followers is one of the many ways companies can gauge their social media marketing progress. However, this doesn’t mean you should follow back just about everyone who follows you, hoping to get more followers. Sure, it can work sometimes, but most of the times you’re merely opening yourself up to bogus spam followers, bots, and phishing scams. You may end up with a seriously unmanageable feed populated with nothing but other brands’ marketing stunts, potentially poisonous links, and oversharing tweets.

Instead: Not all those connections will prove to be beneficial. At the end of the day, always opt for quality over quantity. Don’t follow everyone who’s followed you, just the ones that can help your brand thrive. This means influencers, brand partners, and active community members.

Hashtag Bombarding

Using hashtags allows you to manage tweets that carry similar themes and topics for better viewing, better management of interactions, and for curated crowdsourcing over Twitter. Unfortunately, some brands today abuse the hashtag. They use excessive hashtags in different configurations that range from using a multitude of synonyms for a single topic to appending unrelated hashtags. It’s already challenging to share your messages with the 140-characters limit, and bombarding your followers with a ton of hashtag isn’t really going to help.

Instead: Dumping an obscene number of hashtags on a tweet is spammy and can make your followers feel like you’re daring them to unfollow you. There are many ways you can use hashtags, so plan a hashtag strategy instead to better monitor opinions shared about your brand, or follow along discussions in real-time.

Abusing @Mentions

Mentioning a specific user on Twitter can help publicly direct communications to specific people, and monitor interactions. It can also attract their attention to your Twitter profile—something many brands are counting on in order to get their brands noticed on the Twittersphere. As such, you’ll find many brands tweeting the same template message multiple times only with different people @mentioned. Some even mention influencers which is the Twitter equivalent of name dropping, hoping that the influencer will actually respond and that their fans will notice and start following them too. This can be annoying for the user, especially when the message has nothing to do with them or any of their interests.

Instead: Focus on making genuine engagements and building relationships the core of your Twitter use. This means reserving @mentions when you actually are talking to people or referring to them on a genuinely conversational tweet.

Tags: Microblogging, social media marketing, Social Media Marketing tips, Twitter Marketing