Twitter introduced its new mute button feature this past May. If businesses aren’t careful, the new feature can definitely hurt them by allowing faithful followers to hit the mute button, and in most cases they’ll most likely not be unmuted.
The mute button’s main purpose is to hide an account’s tweets and retweets from a user’s stream so they won’t be able to see any activity from that account as long as they’re muted. This will come in handy, for example, when a business is hosting a twitter party or live event that not all of their followers may be interested in. Some users don’t want to scroll through a sudden barrage of tweets from a business they follow.
The downside for the business that has been muted is that followers may not remember to unmute them or may find that they would rather stop following the business altogether. One way to avoid being put on a follower’s mute list permanently would be for businesses to announce ahead of time that they are having a Twitter party or live event and publish the start and end time. This way a business would be giving the followers advance notice and allow them the opportunity to mute ahead of the scheduled event.
When a business gives its followers a heads up, it shows consideration instead of just suddenly inundating their followers with tweets and retweets. This helps make followers feel as though the business cares. Also, businesses can avoid being muted by trying to keep fresh and interesting content flowing. Followers will be less prone to mute an account if they are used to seeing great content from it.
Another way to keep followers interested and away from the mute button is to incorporate lots of visual content, and this can’t be stressed enough. Tweets with pictures, videos and infographics are typically viewed and shared more than tweets without, so be creative and innovative with your tweets so that you aren’t permanently muted.
