How to alienate people with your Twitter account

When people follow me on Twitter, I always have a look at their profiles. It seems polite. If someone's genuinely interested in my tweets, I'll probably follow them back to see what they have to say.

This  is why when using social media for business, you should make sure that you're using it to engage people in conversation not simply for shameless self-promotion. Social media sites like Twitter (or Friendfeed or Plurk) are there for discussion. They are places you can locate people with shared interests and talk to them. They are also places you can find your customers and find out about their likes and dislikes.

What doesn't fly on social media sites is the profile I saw today on Twitter (the culprit shall remain nameless) who is using his microblogging feed to the world to brag about how much better he is than everyone else on the planet.

His feed contains the sort of information that belongs on a corporate website - information about the types of clients he handles and the revenues he's generating. It's also the type of bragging of the "I'm so much better than everyone else because..." variety that should be saved for sales calls by pyramid scheme salesmen.

He's added me as a friend so I went in to have a look at who he was and how he presents himself to the world, but within 10 seconds of being told how much better he is at my job than I am and with no useful or even vaguely entertaining information to offer via his feed I closed my browser window and decided to blog about it.

Twitter has the potential to be a very powerful tool for entering into multiple conversations with a wide range of people and for acquiring information and even traffic. But you have to make sure that you listen as well as talk and when you do speak that you're actually speaking to people rather than talking over them.

Follow Searched Designed Developed on Twitter at http://twitter.com/SearchDesignDev.