Poll: Does it Creep You Out When Companies Follow You on Twitter?

Everywhere I look I see PR people recommend following your customers on Twitter – and they mean this specifically:

You see someone mention your product on Twitter via Twitter Search.

Follow them.

Observe, converse, and engage.

Sounds simple enough, right? But for the life of me I can’t get into it – I manage my company’s Twitter account and the only instance in which I feel comfortable contacting a customer is when they’re experiencing a technical problem of some sort.

I’m the gunshy social media maven when it comes to my business’ account I suppose – I simply feel like it would make people who use our product uncomfortable if I indiscriminately followed them after they mentioned us on Twitter.

So I’d like all of you to help me definitively answer the question listed in the poll below – does it make you feel uncomfortable when a company follows you immediately after you mention one of their products?

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And if you are feeling particularly generous, I would love it if you could ReTweet this – I’d really love to get a wide sample of opinion on the matter.

Thanks a lot folks, and a happy Friday to you all.

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Comments 5

Aaronontheweb wrote:
My goal is to get around 100 votes – this is in no way scientific but I would at least like to have a respectably large sample size :p
Posted 06 Mar 2009 at 5:56 pm ¶
Hans wrote:
Well I did a tweet about your blogpost. And it is an importan question so I made a little longer comment here.

I have done the same with bloggers who have bloged about news stories in our small swedish web science journal. Budget for such is 0 for marketing so bloggers who links something they liked is important.

It has a personal prize of some sort to allways contact when you notice a blog post so long periods I dont do it (so much other stuff to do – little time / small budget). But this usually works good and do not creep people out. It has focus on giving something back on a personal level and show a human face.

1. I read the blog.

2. I email if possible.

3. I say thanks. I explain that our budget is 0 so bloggers like you is important.

4. I tell about specific projects I have done to thank the bloggosphere in big (for example one site about using free picture, one about fact checking and a couple of more).

5. I give some examples of stuff I like with their blog. Like a blog post I feelt had a good point.

6. I make a suggestion in a positive way. Not something they have written that I feel is bad. More like a tips on finding a good picture + that they can have Blogger.com comment form under blog posts and such.

7. I suggest some similar articles on the same subject we have or other sites.

Good luck with your blog and Twitter-customer!

PS
I have only read 3 posts yet but your blog is quite good!
Posted 17 Mar 2009 at 1:17 am ¶
Aaronontheweb wrote:
Hans,

You are my hero. Thanks for reading and I’m glad you’re enjoying it!
Posted 17 Mar 2009 at 9:17 am ¶
Hans wrote:
I think your blog-design is rather nice to. Not anything disturbing at all in graphics – feels very conservative and “serious”.
Posted 17 Mar 2009 at 9:30 am ¶
Aaronontheweb wrote:
Yeah I wanted something that’s somewhat minimalist and uncluttered. Although blogs tend to become cluttered over time by the vary nature of adding categories, tags, and posts I think this design comes off as pretty sanitary.
Posted 19 Mar 2009 at 2:43 pm ¶

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From Poll: What do you do when someone Tweets a pirated version of your product? | Marketing Ninja on 17 Apr 2009 at 2:38 pm ¶
[...] last time I had a question about Twitter etiquette, I made a poll about it. Well, given that I got some decent feedback last time, I’m inclined to ask [...]

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