Last week, I talked to the Nonprofit Summit at Luzerne County Community College about blogging and social media.  I don’t say that to underscore that I’m kind of a big deal (trust me, I’m not), but as a set up to this:  My co-presenter (John Dawe) and I stressed that Twitter is a great tool for nonprofits to use because it’s free, simple to use, has a great toolset for locating people and monitoring conversations and has an immediate, as-it-happens feel.  If there’s only one social media application you embrace, we said, it should be Twitter.

But it’s pretty easy to use Twitter poorly.  Don’t do that.

Let’s just say, for instance, that a business followed me on Twitter a few days ago, and that I didn’t reciprocate the follow for a ton of reasons.

The chief ones?

1. A busy, tiled background of your logo and your products does not make me want to keep my eyes on the page.  In fact, my eyes are being pulled in 20 directions at once, not to mention the vertical feed of the account’s Tweets.  Isolate a nice, eye-friendly color in your branding, and make a calm, monotone background with your branding in the upper left – where anybody looking at your page will see it and where it won’t interfere with other page design elements.

2. Using Twitter as nothing but a broadcast medium.  The group blog that I’m a part of has a Twitter feed that only posts about updates to our Web site, yes, but that’s a handful of Tweets a week.  That’s not excessive.  The site in question links to several blog posts and articles every few hours.  That’s just spammy.  Looking at Summize to see what people are saying about this account, it turns out that a few people have responded favorably to one specific article – that’s probably the one the person managing the account should have used and cut the others: quality trumps quantity in all social media and in Twitter especially (because space is at a premium of 140 characters).

3. No Conversation.  Going back to my search results from Summize, there have been a number of direct replies (@ messages, for the Twitter-savvy), but the account hasn’t been responding to any of them.  You’re missing the point of social media if you aren’t going to be social.

In the space of a few days, the account I’m talking about has been suspended by Twitter due to excessive complaints about its spamminess, so plenty of other people must have agreed with me.

Takeaway: If your business is using Twitter, paying attention to proper etiquette is a must.  Social media is about community, and every community has rules to follow.