How not to do a Twitter Q&A

Social media is like going to the gym.

It's great if you show up, but that's only half the battle – real work is required if you want to see results.

So said Scott Talan, assistant professor of public & strategic communication at American University, while breaking down the Labor Department's July 13 Twitter Q&A session.

"They get an 'A' for effort," Talan said. On authentic engagement, however, he said the session ranked "below a 'C.'"

What made the session fall flat?

The Q&A was tied to the White House's Conference on Aging, with Labor Secretary Tom Perez tweeting out answers to questions posed by people using the #WhiteHouseOnAOL hashtag -- but Perez responded to only nine questions, despite many more being asked.

A couple of Perez' tweets contained specific answers and links to resources, as when he was asked about the losses consumers face when retirement planners give conflict-of-interest-tainted advice.

WH study showed potential impact of conflicted advice is in the billions for consumers. See http://t.co/8kC69OwQOa https://t.co/K2Lle3kxca

— Tom Perez (@LaborSec) July 13, 2015

Other tweets, however, were merely broad, stock answers:

save early, save as often as u can. when you leave one job for another, leave your $$ in the plan. #thinklongterm https://t.co/yHnphDjAlC

— Tom Perez (@LaborSec) July 13, 2015

And in a few cases, Perez' tweets merely acknowledged questions, rather than responding to them.

A number of people have raised this concern about need to raise earnings limit. thank you for raising this. https://t.co/SN51aT3GGq

— Tom Perez (@LaborSec) July 13, 2015

"That's part of the nature of Twitter, you only have this 140-character space to answer," the social media guru Talan noted. But Perez could have used multiple tweets to respond to a single question, and given the short-burst character of tweets, "You'd expect [the number of answers] to be closer to 90, not nine," Talan said.

Talan also noted that the best social media campaigns are typically "detailed, personalized, [and] substantive," but those elements seemed largely absent in Perez' answers. The Q&A will go down as one more neutral-to-negative entry in the "uneven success" story of federal agencies' social media, Talan said.

The whole thing might best be characterized as a "learning opportunity," he added.

There was one person Perez appeared to beat on social media, however: former New York Governor George Pataki, who appeared to answer only six or seven questions during his #AskPataki Q&A, which also took place July 13.

The Labor Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.