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You’re a little afraid of this social media business and you don’t want to misstep so you opted to protect your tweets. This makes me crazy! Twitter and Facebook work totally differently. With Facebook, you do want to watch what you say and use strong privacy settings. With Twitter, you should still watch what you say but don’t make people jump through hooks to talk with you.
Aaron Lee just wrote about the businesses who protect their tweets in his post, “Businesses: Are Your Twitter Accounts Set To Private?”
All of his points are equally important to individuals.
Your tweets don’t appear in the public stream if you protect your tweets.
Twitter is all about building community and when you protect your tweets, you put a quick halt to all the community building efforts there are.
If you are confused about how to get started on social media and are trying to take it slow, your best bet is to do some research and learn rather than putting halts on connections.
If you have never met me before, you may not know my other side. As the owner of Design Resumes, I work with job seekers who often are trying to use social media to learn about opportunities and build connections. Hint, you can’t do that if you shut the door and don’t let anyone in.
Common Twitter newbie errors
I wrote “10 secrets to avoid common Twitter newbie errors” on my other blog, Propelling you to Career Success. You can read them there but here is the one on protected tweets:
Privacy Lock: You are following me but you turned on Protect my tweets in Tweet privacy. If you are only using Twitter to talk to friends, I suppose the privacy level is important. The difference in Twitter from Facebook is that you don’t choose who follows you. Anyone can follow anyone in Twitter. If you follow me and want me to follow back, then make it easy for me to follow you, don’t protect your tweets.
If you are wanting to use Twitter for any marketing efforts, protected tweets makes even less sense. Learning marketing strategies is best done out in the open, not hiding behind walls.
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Congratulations Julie!
This is great Julie, I’m so excited for you… I’m so happy I’ll be joining you on this journey.
Cheers to you, you can count on my support : )
I am so happy too, Mark. You just got to be the first commenter on this blog! I am honored! Thank you. The best thing about this blog is it lets me talk endlessly about my passion for social media!
Congratulations, Julie, on the launch of your new blog! Excellent points about Twitter and protected tweets. When I was new to Twitter, I protected my tweets for a while because I didn’t know what I was doing, and I felt uncomfortable with the notion that everyone could see my tweets. I didn’t understand that along with not seeing my tweets, others couldn’t see my bio. (I think follower information doesn’t show either). This all means that if you’re using Twitter as a means to make connections of any kind, you’ve basically closed yourself off to enabling others to learn about you and thus wanting to connect with you. Now, when someone starts following me who has protected tweets, I don’t follow them. Great post, Julie!
Thanks, Karen, and both you and Mark are proof that Twitter builds relationships if you are open because I met both of you on Twitter! Thank for Stopping by and I look forward to seeing you as a frequent visitor!
Thanks for including my blog Julie, you have nicely covered what I wanted to achieve on my blog too. Btw, nice touch on the “10 secrets to avoid common Twitter newbie errors”
Great post! cheers!
Thanks, Aaron! I read your post two days ago and was in total agreement! I think protecting tweets makes no sense for anyone and can really hamper your success in networking.
I love the post and the new site, Julie!
And that just makes me smile, Jim!
Hi Julie,
Love the new blog. And also thought I’d weigh in with a comment on this topic.
I don’t have protected tweets, but I have no objection if anyone else does. It’s their choice and their right, and in some cases they do it for a good reason, for example:
I have one friend (in real life as well as on Twitter) who is a prolific tweeter. But she has a protected timeline that can only be read by people she has allowed into her circle. She is somewhat paranoid about privacy, and doesn’t necessarily want her employers or colleagues to read her opinions on life (or maybe even them). She works for a large corporation which is very political, as large companies often are. So in her case she has protected her tweets. And I really have no problem with that. It’s her choice and it seems to work just fine.
Of course a business that wants to communicate with the world shouldn’t protect their tweets … or, quite simply, they’re NOT communicating with the world. But …
Let’s say a business offers people a paid upgrade or subscription of some sort, and that paid upgrade includes access to (say) privileged information of some sort. Then they could have a private Twitter account only available to people who have paid for the upgrade. I see nothing wrong with that.
Or let’s say a business decides to open a Twitter account that is only available to their existing clients, and is used as a special channel to communicate with them and them alone … is that wrong?
Thinking about your nice new blog, you could at some stage possibly operate a freemium model, and people who pay the premium could receive special info from you via a separate protected Twitter account, not so different to membership of certain types of Facebook groups …
And maybe Aaron has got a point when he refers to Quatar Airways. Maybe the idea is to get a higher level of engagement by making people specifically request to opt-in to their tweets. Certainly I have found that people who have double-opted in to an email list are ten times more likely to open the email than people who haven’t, so there may well be an argument for such an approach. It would at least be interesting to test the idea and see whether it has any merit …
These are just a few of the thoughts that occurred to me about why protected tweets actually COULD have a part to play. And that’s why I really do not get exercised about it if someone has decided to protect their tweets. At the end of the day, that’s their right and their choice.
Does that make sense, or am I completely missing the point?
Wow, Robert, that was a blog post in itself! Makes sense though. I find that many people with protected tweets are Twitter newbies as I said above and Karen reinforced, often who also may not grasp the other aspects of Twitter. They may not have configured their bio or put up a photo either. Yet they have heard that Twitter is a great medium for networking and connecting.
You and I have both been using Twitter for a long time. My target has been job seekers for the most part but at the same time, the career industry has been getting their toes wet in the whole social media world. Some of the professionals out there are pros and others are very confused. It is the same for small business owners, especially in my Wisconsin world. It is new ground for them.
Your applications are great and I could easily see them working for someone who either employs someone like yourself or is at a high level of engagement with their account. Very thought-provoking.
Thanks Julie. If your main point is to get those who know no better not to protect their tweets, in their own interest, then I am with you 100%. I do think that there are many other (probably commercial) arguments for using protected tweets, and that any post on the subject should perhaps distinguish between them.
Julie,
I feel that you totally expressed my sentiments on this topic! Thanks for having written this post. I also love your new blog
One thing that I would add is that there is also an annoyance factor involved…when someone with protected tweets follows someone and does not allow the followee to view their tweets before essentially forcing the followee to make a semi-commitment to follow them, they may cause the followee to feel some irritation with the protected tweet person – not exactly a positive emotion…
Thanks, Dorlee, both for stopping by and for liking the new blog! It is that annoyance factor that prompted the post. Sometimes it is a newbie mistake, other times it is spam-generation and if it is a newbie mistake, I would guess they don’t want the label of spammer.
Julie, sorry it’s taken so long to see your new blog! It drives me berserk when I see someone has followed me but has protected their tweets.
I know what I’m offering to you: how in the world can I decide if I want to follow you back when you hide the sole basis I know of for making that determination?
Bearing in mind the excellent points that Robert makes, yes: there are going to be legitimate cases where someone chooses to protect their tweets.
But in all honesty, I think those are very rare cases. To me, it’s like hiding your LinkedIn connections from your first degree connections: there are some very unusual cases where it’s legit, but those cases are many fewer than are actually merited, in my view.
I only launched on Friday, Ed! The project was set up in late March but I didn’t get the finalization done until last week… so you are not late! You are still an early bird.
You are right – Robert has great points but I am not aiming this blog at people who have reached that high level of marketing strategy. The people I kept running into were the newbies or baby bloggers who were confused by so many issues and didn’t know where to look.
I have been using the tools for a long time so I can speak to the newbie feelings and help them find resources and solid advice.
You’re also right about hiding LI connections as being similar. I know recruiters who do so their competition can’t search their client base but that’s also something I don’t worry about.
That drives me nuts (protecting connections from first level contacts). I can understand a recruiter doing it, but most others? Nope. Especially like the guy I connected with earlier today who had 5700 connections, he invited me and I accepted and then I couldn’t access anything but shared connections which in this case we might have had one or two. (he wasn’t a recruiter)
Thanks for the comment, Brad. I figure on most social networks you need to be open. Facebook is a little different for some people and you do need to be cautious in your connections but still I find that there are so many great people out there. We just don’t know them yet.
Good morning Julie…
I saw Ed write about your new blog. I like it. You have a nice writing style, and very good content too!
I agree 100% with your take on protected tweets… its kind of a pet peeve of mine.
If someone wants to say or write something, they should just say it. If a person says or writes something dumb, offensive, or wrong, they should take responsibility. Everyone makes mistakes.
Your point: “Twitter is all about building community and when you protect your tweets you put a quick halt to all the community building efforts” – I think that says it so well.
On a side note, the way you link from this site to your other is bound to enhance seo for both. Very cool!
John, Thanks for stopping by. Ed has been a huge supporter of my other side for a long time. We met because of HireFriday and he has been a valuable asset ever since.
I’m glad you like the new project! It has been long in the making, sitting in my head for about a year before it moved to the web. Hope you will come again.
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I’m a twitter newbie and am so glad I found this blog. My tweets were protected – not anymore! Thank you Julie.
Thanks, Satie… ever since I launched this blog, this has been the most popular post. When you hear all the information about privacy, you think you should protect your tweets but no. Not on this platform. Glad to meet you. The best way to grow your Twitter following is to respond to others. Welcome to my stream!
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