You have your business Twitter account set up and you’ve started tweeting.  Maybe you’re posting once a day, or maybe you’re posting every couple of hours.  You may think up clever tweets and article links once a week and schedule them all to go out periodically throughout the week ahead.  You may mix in some random thoughts, complaints when things go wrong and excited announcements when things go right.

But then you ask yourself the question: do people really care?

What exactly do customers, prospects and partners want to hear about on Twitter?  What are the things that can turn them off, and what kind of information are they seeing when they check their twitter accounts?

This article from Hubspot presents survey data via MarketingProfs by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and Georgia Tech (get all the details on the survey in the article).

The findings are interesting – the top three most hated types of Twitter posts?

1.  Back-and-forth personal conversations – e.g., “@friend hey there, want to meet up later for a movie?”…”@friend2 sure, sounds great – where and when?”…etc.

2.  Mood updates – e.g., “so annoyed right now” or “such a long day”

3.  Activity/location updates – e.g., “Just checked in at XYZ restaurant” or “at the gym”

So what SHOULD you be tweeting about?  Check out the full article for details on 7 things to tweet about.  A few of our favorites:

– Links to interesting and relevant content
– Questions to your followers
– Answers to followers’ and other Tweeters’ questions
– Offers and promotions
– Data and research

It’s a great article based on some interesting data – check it out here.