I always @reply to any­one who con­tacts me whether for per­sonal or for work. But I also don’t have the sta­tus that you have so the hand­ful I receive today I feel I have to and in as short time as pos­si­ble. I under­stand your con­cerns, but from a new guy, get­ting a response from a well known guy or author like your­self could make that per­sons day, even make them want to read your other stuff more because they feel more connected.

Just so you know, my traf­fic was from Tweet­deck so you would have a big fat ZERO from Twit­ter on my con­nec­tion. I like what Guy said, “Traf­fic is traffic!”

Stephen, so what are you say­ing? You like Guy say­ing Traf­fic is Traf­fic, but Twit­ter is a big zero.

I don’t do it often enough — chiefly because I’m overex­tended — but I cer­tainly see the wis­dom of reply­ing to peo­ple pub­licly (if you can add value) or pri­vately (just to thank them personally).

@dspark type response only when my com­ment would mean some­thing to strangers, drive traf­fic to you, cre­ate inter­est in a topic, etc and DM for any­thing awk­ward, per­sonal or busi­ness related. Always engage when the oppor­tu­nity presents itself.

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Guy Kawasaki… over hyped, arro­gant and spammy.

1) I almost always pub­licly reply to peo­ple that “@” me on twit­ter. Show­ing that I’m approach­able and join in on con­ver­sa­tions is impor­tant. I only say “almost” instead of “always” sim­ply because there is so much reply spam out there and accounts reply­ing to me sim­ply because I tweeted some key­word that they are monitoring.

2) With just one of my blogs, the time on site is almost iden­ti­cal when look­ing at if they came in from twitter.com or typed in the URL directly. In some instances, the time on site of twit­ter traf­fic is sig­nif­i­cantly higher than other refer­ring sites. Guy is right. It doesn’t count traf­fic from Tweet­Deck or other apps, but it is inter­est­ing to note.

I’d guess that it is either a con­tent issue, or an audi­ence issue. You may just be send­ing the wrong peo­ple to the blog via twitter.

Great ques­tions BTW.

Guy Kawasaki’s Twit­ter Rules for Business…

This blog is about mar­ket­ing, and brand­ing in the age of social media. If you’re new here, you may want to sub­scribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!David Spark, of Socialmedia.biz recently caught up with Guy Kawasaki at the CMO Club Sum­mit in San…

Thanks David for post­ing this. It suc­cinctly shows busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als why and how to use Twit­ter in three easy steps. By the way, I came to your post from Tweet­Deck too. Just more messin’ with your analytics.

UFM then

Guy’s not only a nice guy and one of the lead­ing thinkers around strate­gic use of social media, but he’s an exem­plar of how to mar­ket one­self in the new econ­omy. I say don’t blow him off — take notes!

I reply to @ as much as pos­si­ble, check­ing first recent tweets and bio to see what is inter­est­ing or note­wor­thy, and to see what I have in my bag that will be of inter­est. Mostly DM, unless there can be added value to pub­lic at large.

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[…] Twit­ter Tips for Busi­nesses – Guy Kawasaki has cre­ated a video that gives the best tips for busi­nesses that want to use twit­ter to grow their pres­ence in social media as well as grow their cus­tomer base. […]

I always try to @ reply peo­ple out of com­mon cour­tesy — if someone’s direct­ing a query or remark at you, you ought to respond in some way or another. It also builds up dia­logue to which oth­ers will chime in, lis­ten to, or retweet — all lift­ing your expo­sure and brand­ing (which is a bonus :D)

I would agree with Guy though, I don’t see any traf­fic being “bad” except for spambot-crawling and the like (which just messes with your ana­lyt­ics). And quality-of-traffic can’t really be mea­sured solely by time spent on the site — dif­fer­ent peo­ple read at dif­fer­ent rates and use sites in dif­fer­ent way.

The last time I looked at my Twit­ter traf­fic, the time on my site equaled my other traf­fic. So that was com­fort­ing to see, but too many times I’ve seen Twit­ter traf­fic yield­ing less than five sec­ond aver­age time spent on my site where other traf­fic is in mul­ti­ple min­utes. I under­stand peo­ple can read quickly, but not that quickly.

My argu­ment is that Guy Kawasaki is SO focused on Twit­ter and he believes it to be the panacea for all traf­fic. I was just point­ing out that while it is valu­able and excit­ing, that when you dig down deep, the qual­ity of the traf­fic is often poor and if that’s the case, maybe you shouldn’t be so com­pletely focused on Twit­ter as the main means of pro­mo­tion. Not only that, but a whop­ping 74% of ALL Twit­ter traf­fic is gen­er­ated by 5% of users and Twit­ter con­sti­tutes a mere 11% of all activ­ity on the real-time web.

[…] infor­ma­tional tweets and make get­ting re-tweeted your goal, Guy Kawasaki advises in this video.  Socialmedia.biz Pos­si­bly related posts: (auto­mat­i­cally generated)Guy Kawasaki on the 10–20-30 RuleThe 10/20/30 […]

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[…] Guy Kawasaki’s top Twit­ter tips for busi­nesses — Guy Kawasaki is pop­u­lar. Twit­ter is pop­u­lar. Tips are pop­u­lar. Put them all together in a video inter­view and you get a popular post. […]