"2.0…the future"

Intended Audience:

• Beer lovers anywhere
• Anyone interested in Social Media
• Anyone new to Twitter

Summary

• You never get a second chance to make a first impression
• Seeking followers with zero Tweets may not be a good idea

Brains Black – What’s not to like?

I was interested to discover this afternoon that I was being followed on Twitter by @BrainsBlack which seems to be the official Twitter account for a new stout being launched by long established Welsh brewers S A Brains.

I can only assume that they chose to follow me because in my Twitter biography I identify myself as a “Former professional brewer.” Now I am fairly picky about who I follow back and so I usually spend time examining each new follower that I am not already following before deciding to commit to a return follow. The factors that I take into account are those you would expect:

• the visuals on their Twitter web presence – the background, avatar and biography
• the figures for following and followers
• a sample of their historic Tweets

Sometimes I can rule out a return follow very quickly. For example if they are scantily clad and have only one Tweet that mentions “reproduction” then not only do they not get followed back – they get blocked.

If they have no avatar and no biography they would have to be Tweeting high value comments, links and insight that I am not already seeing in my network to warrant a return follow from me.

So I was a little surprised when I looked at http://twitter.com/BrainsBlack to find this:

At first glance there is a real issue with this Twitter account – there are no Tweets.

The grab below is a more detailed view.

Putting to one side the zero Tweets issue the first impressions of this account are favourable – it looks like a professional corporate Twitter account – and one that is likely to get a return follow from me.

But that zero Tweets issue is very hard to ignore.

I find myself wondering several things:

• has the zero Tweets adversely influenced the “followers” – they have 19 followers (inbound) against 249 following (outbound)?
• what is the logic of going live by following Twitterers without offering any Tweets for potential followers to view?
• is it reasonable to assume that most people followed by this account will look at @BrainsBlack?
• have they given adequate consideration to the first impression they are creating?

Looking through the list of “following” and the email alert received when they followed me, I discovered that I was the 157th person out of the 249 following count. Which seems to indicate a very rapid increase in numbers being followed by @BrainsBlack.

On a Friday.

Which almost makes me wonder if someone was rushing to meet a deadline, rather than applying the principles of social media?

Ongoing research

I revisited the account at 16:45 whilst drafting this post – about an hour after I first saw the account and grabbed the screen shots above. The following count was steady at 249 and the followers had increased to 22.

I can’t help but feel that Brains (if in fact it is an official Brains account) might have been wiser to seed the account with at least a few Tweets before setting out to follow others.

I would be really interested to hear from Brains about the decisions and processes that led to this event which has piqued my interest and triggered my observations. I have sent an @ to @BrainsBlack setting them a Twitter challenge – which might indicate whether they plan to use Twitter to listen to the audience they develop.

I am following @BrainsBlack back and I plan to revisit the data frequently over the next days and weeks to see what I can learn from their approach.

In passing I should also note that searching for “brains on Twitter” will keep you amused for a while.

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