Mistakes PR Pros Make on Twitter and Preventing Future Occurrences

Twitter is one of most frequently used social media platforms in existence, but it is still misused, misunderstood and inadequately utilized. PR professionals are some of those most guilty of these actions and are probably not achieving their desired results. A recent article about the mistakes PR pros make on Twitter revealed insight and ways professionals can rebound from them.

1. Playing fast and loose with manual retweets

As PR pros, we know that we don’t just write tweets—we craft them. Everything down to the punctuation is intentional. Thus, if you’re going to manually retweet a tweet (meaning copying and pasting a tweet with “RT” in front of it, as opposed to hitting the “Retweet” button), don’t change the original tweeter’s writing. Or, if you need to for space reasons, be sure to use “MT,” which stands for modified tweet, to clearly indicate that changes have been made.

2. Lacking personality

With their clients, co-workers and other peers following them, many PR pros fear being too personal on Twitter. However, it is certainly possible to remain professional and showcase your personality at the same time. Good PR firms constantly preach how incorporating personality into writing enhances it, and the same holds true when restricted to 140 characters.

3. Direct message abuse

For active Twitter users—which most journalists are—a Twitter direct message is more personal than an email. After all, you can only send a direct message to a user who is following you. So if you’d like to reach out to a journalist or consumer on Twitter, tweet at them; don’t spam their direct message inbox. Doing the latter is more likely to get you an ‘unfollow’ rather than a positive response.

Although these are just a few of the common mistakes, there are other ones that have not been mentioned. Fully taking advantage of Twitter will only improve your performance at work.

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