I overheard the expression “the silent tweetment” on a late night radio program I was listening to last week. The DJ gave out his Twitter address and told listeners, fundamentally, to communicate with him.

I found this mildly amusing but actually this is a phenomena non exclusive to Twitter.

You receive an enquiry from a prospective customer who tells you about his bankrupt stock for sale business and how he has identified how you could help him. So you’ve a number of talks and agree to meet up over coffee to discuss. The two of you seem to resonate with one another and he recommends that you send a proposal in writing.

Off you go, research, draft and write suggestion. You send it off, no response for a week. So you choose to call and he tells you he’s received the suggestion and is mulling it over with his colleague. Another few weeks pass and you are getting the silent treatment.

At this point, you can only believe the deal has gone forever.

And the conversations on Twitter can be very much like that. Twitter conversation are rather of a social nature and opinion related and can develop and vanish much like the eventuality I discussed above.

From experience, a way to beat this silence is to acknowledge that other people are busy in their lives and to re-engage with them you should personally take responsibility for the communication breaking down.

So in a tweet you might say, “To those fans I’ve never connected with, I am sorry, I am still learning this”

In an email to a long lost prospect you may say “Sorry I’ve been giving you the silent treatment lately, not extremely business like of me. If you are are still open to reconnecting, no pressure, just to things are good with you, then drop me a line it would be good to hear from you.

You see the tone of both these pieces of correspondence puts the fault completely on your shoulders, takes the pressure away from them and creates a place for them to reply.

With both these approaches, you can probably get an answer such “no, it was me giving you the silent treatment, I’ve been busy.

Try it. It may just break the silence.

John Spiers writes for brands365. Brands365 offer bankrupt stock for sale via its online membership club.

Tags: social fatigue, social media, Twitter

This entry was posted on 21. February 2012 at 14:45. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Posted in Twitter by John Spiers Comments Off