While we have all come to love Twitter or at least in my case, accept the inevitable, Legal Nurse Consultants are making egregious errors while using their accounts.  Writing at MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog, Megan Leap discusses several “gruesome Twitter pet peeves that could irk your profile visitors—and cost you followers.” Here are few major no-nos:

The automated direct message (DM). Twitter allows people who follow each other to exchange private messages that don’t appear in public timelines. Some people use this function to send automated DMs to all new followers that say “Thanks for the follow. Let’s figure out how to work together!” or “Nice to meet you. I offer social media consulting services. Hit me up if you have any questions.” “If you have these set up,” says Leap, “please turn them off. They are rude, irrelevant, and oh-so-obviously automated.”

The typo in your bio. We have less stringent proofreading standards in online venues—no one will crucify you for tweets with an occasional typo. But it looks bad when your profile contains poor grammar or spelling. “Please, if you only proofread one thing, proofread your Twitter bio,” she pleads. “Copy and paste it into Microsoft Word. Have your coworker review it. Whatever you need to do, don’t let typos happen in your bio. It’s a pretty permanent piece of your online presence.”

The absence of a profile image. When you first sign up for Twitter, you’re given a generic “egg” avatar as a temporary placeholder—if you don’t immediately upload your headshot or your practice’s logo, expect users to regard your tweets with suspicion.

I think it’s a difficult thing to use Twitter effectively in your practice. What I generally see are more and more Legal Nurse Consultants using Twitter as a streamlined version of Facebook for their friends and colleagues. Dropping a quote or an article headline may fit into the 140 character format but it doesn’t always register as effective content usage from a marketing perspective. As a matter of fact, that colleague I spoke of last week who sent me way to many Twitter texts? Still at it. Haven’t even opened one of them. It’s just irrelevant ranting and random thoughts with nothing designed to help my business; won’t be long before I stop following them all together.  Don’t let your Twitter presence do that to someone else.

Try this for one week. Make every Tweet that is going out to colleagues, clients or potential clients content heavy. I mean, give them something solid to use in their practice, a free tip or guide, or an access code to a free ebook on your website. Let me know how much clientele you build from this compared to quotes, song lyrics and check in status Tweets.

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