Be a Dumb Tweet

Dumb Twitter
Dumb Twitter

Are you making your followers feel dumb?

This is one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of Twitter. Not everyone is as smart as you are. Not everyone is good at spelling or grammar. Not everyone has a large vocabulary or a deep understanding of obscure topics. You have to speak to your audience or you will risk losing your audience.

If you are trying to appeal to a wide range of people, the last thing you want to do is make them feel stupid or inferior. You want them to feel like they can talk to you and that they get you. You want to be relatable. To be relatable you have to be accessible. This means not speaking over peoples heads or making lots of unknown references. Keep the inside jokes between you and your friends, because the rest of the twitterverse just feels left out of the loop. And if they are left out of your loop then you will certainly be left out of there’s.

I bring this up because it is something I frequently see and frequently have to remind myself of as well. When you are tweeting you want to make sure that you are speaking in the voice of your brand. But you also need to speak in the voice that your audience wants to hear. So if your audience likes snobby intellectuals then feel free to talk about the disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities post-antibellum america or the hegemony of goth culture. But if you don’t want to sound like a uptight academic then you might want to keep the big words on the smallish scale and remember that not all your followers understand complex vocabulary or references.

Most of your followers will not do you the favor and tell you when you are talking over their head. They will just stop paying attention. So you don’t need to be a dumb tweet but make sure you keep your tweets accessible.