I just had to share this. I was about to unfollow a company that never followed me back and I stopped myself because I realized the bigger implication of this, and the marketing lesson that can be learned from not following back the people who follow you on Twitter.
So I wrote them a letter.
Here goes:
Hi,
I normally don’t do this (ok, I do it sometimes – but not a lot because I feel like people won’t listen anyway), but in your case I really thought I should tell you.
Ok, getting to the point…
You know, a while ago I saw you on ethical deal. I was SO impressed by your business, I even shared it on Facebook – not related to the deal, but just shared it was a neat business idea.
I didn’t buy your deal, but I did send it out to a bunch of friends who I thought could use it.
I also followed you on twitter at that time.
Just now I’m going through my manageflitter.com account and cleaning out my non-followers and non-active follower as I usually do to keep my twitter account in check.
I recognized that you were one of the people listed as not following me back (with a sad face next to it).
And I thought – wow…do these people know that I am a person that took interest in them, would probably promote them even more to my friends, and the reason I am now going to unfollow them is because they were not courteous enough to follow me back on twitter?
And what’s crazier is that you got a lot of exposure from ethicalDeal…and the trick to doing daily deals is to capture your leads and follow up – otherwise your marketing efforts have gone down the drain and you end up paying for clients instead of paying for repeat customers. (It doesn’t happen magically, I don’t care what any daily deal company tells you – it’s all in the follow up).
So now I’m just one person, and I’m about to unfollow you…all because you never followed me back!
But if you had gone through your list of twitter followers (as I do), to see what kind of interesting, non-spammy people have been following you, and chosen to follow them back to return the favour, you would still have me as a follower (supposing you find me interesting and non-spammy).
So I was going to ignore it and just click on the unfollow button and go to bed.
But I thought no – this is marketing, and companies should know.
I work in marketing, and I would love to know this information about customers of my clients.
But the problem is no one says enough (and when they do they’re just complaining about nothing valuable and need to get a life). And companies don’t ask enough.
And in the past I’ve said things, and gotten the corporate, cold response that basically it’s not their problem and they don’t care. So I stopped telling companies about my experience.
But should all companies suffer from that? No, I think you should know you had me as a little promoter of your business and now I’m unfollowing you because you didn’t follow me back and it feels personal…even though you probably had no idea.
So hopefully these kinds of things will matter to you more now :)
I’m probably going to turn this into a blog post since it turned out so long…
Thanks for listening,
Joyce