The Power Of “Thank You”

No matter what industry you’re in, no matter what you’re doing in that industry, communication is so important to getting things done. The message could be verbal or visual, doesn’t make any difference. Without the exchange of information, we’d be bumps on a log.

Sometimes, though, that communication can be something as simple as a “thank you”, but have a major positive impact on someone. Think of all the times you’ve held the door open for a stranger and they just walked right on through without acknowledging your act of kindness. Call me old fashioned, but I sometimes say “You’re welcome” to see if that snaps them out of their world for a few seconds.

Now let’s place that in an online setting, a place where it’s so easy to ignore someone and drop our usual standard of common courtesy. Ah, but you’ve no doubt seen those autoresponders for when you leave a comment on someone’s post and getting an automated email thank you for doing so. Or opted in to someone’s mailing list and received and automated response thanking you, too.

Did you know you can do that with Twitter after someone follows you? Yep, it’s called TweetLater. It’s free and once you set it up, you can add your own personal message that will be sent to the person that just followed you. This could be a thank you, a link to your blog, and maybe — if appropriate — you could link them to your product or service. This last part is something you have to be very careful with as it may turn off some people on the spot.

And that’s not all TweetLater does. You can automatically follow people who follow you, schedule tweets for future delivery, and create keyword alerts. Are you interested in what a certain “sammich man” has to say? If you narrow it down to a keyword, you can be notified when that word is used in one of his tweets.

For those of you who have followed me on Twitter (thank you!). I hope you have see the autoresponder in action. Sure, it’s automated, but it’s still a nice way of letting people know you’ve taken the time to let people know they exist and have done something you appreciate.