What's the best way to thank on Twitter?
This is something I’ve been struggling with pretty much since I joined Twitter over a year ago: how do you let people know you appreciate what they’ve done without filling up your Twitter stream with posts that are of low value to other readers?
Yes, if they’re following you, you can send a DM (Direct Message). But if they’re not, you have no choice but to post in the public stream. Because I don’t want my page to be dominated by what-should-be-private thank-yous (I hate it when I visit someone else’s page and see 70% of the Tweets are thank-yous, and I don’t choose to follow those people), and because when I’m thanking for retweets (reposting something I’ve posted, so their own network sees it) or Follow Fridays (nominations of cool people to follow) it’s generally a mixture of followers and non-followers, I’ve tended to send a group thank-you to everyone at once (which is very easy to do on TweetDeck). I don’t always know who is in each category, and it’s certainly frustrating to try to DM someone only to discover they aren’t following you.
I don’t send a thank-you for following me, because I don’t see auto-DMs as adding value very much of the time, and with over 2000 followers, it’s not practical to send real individual notes. But I do like to say thanks when someone retweets or nominates me as a cool person to follow. And yet, if my stream were filled with personal thank-yous to those not following me, the stream would become boring and people would stop nominating me.
Today, I logged on to find that someone had criticized my group thank-you practice, in both an @ reply (public) and a DM (private). He didn’t feel the group thank-you was sufficiently personal. And he’s right–I’ve never felt the solution was ideal.
So I wonder…what IS the ideal way to handle this? How do YOU balance the need to be personal with the need to deliver high value in a Twitter profile? I’m eager to hear your comment either below or on Twitter @ShelHorowitz .
