Don’t automate your tweets – please!

I’ve not had a good ol’ rant for a while. So forgive me while I indulge myself.

Something that’s always annoyed me is automated Direct Messages on Twitter. So when you follow someone you get a tweet “sincerely” thanking you for following them.

There’s no sincerity in automated messages!

But what’s got my back up today is James Caans twitter feed.

I’ve been fortunate enough to meet James Caan on a few occasions. Once at a small breakfast meeting when the Prince’s Trust Enterprise Fellowship was first formed and more recently at a BizSpark event.

If you’ve ever heard James Caan talk about his entrepreneurial journey then you can’t help but be impressed by what he’s achieved, how he achieved it and how engaging a speaker he is. He also has an amazing ability to immediately know what questions to ask to get straight to the heart of any business matter.

All that makes it more dissapointing that his Twitter feed now has a collection of quotes that are automatically churned our once every two hours.

Examples as follows:

“You are what you are because that’s what you want to be. You, and only you, have the power to make a change.”

“I am a champion standing over the shadow of my former self.”

“Stand up and say loudly to yourself, ‘I WILL BE A WINNER’. Believe me, you will be one; conviction and attitude matters.”

If you want “inspirational” or “motivational” quotes there are already enough people on Twitter spouting those. I think (and I could be wrong) that most people following James would hope to see more substance and engagement in his Tweets and are more interested in what he’s up to than stuff like this. See Peter Jones on Twitter for an example of what i mean. I’m sure James has much more value to add to the Twitterverse than this stuff.

The only place I can see for automated tweets is for company (as opposed to personal) feeds. So whilst the KashFlow Twitter account sends out our latest press release and software changes, my personal feed is not and never will be automated.

I feel so much better now that’s off my chest!