I spend a fair amount of time on twitter (or at least reading tweets in my twitter client) and I love following interesting people. It gives me a happy tingle to get replies from new followers and I love having ongoing conversations with people. I follow some awesome people and refer to these people in conversations by their twitter names as if they were their actual names.
When it comes to following people however I am pretty picky, I won’t just follow people who follow me. I don’t tend to follow celebrities, and if I do follow you and you do any of the 9 things listen below I will unfollow you pretty darn quick!
1.You Exceed the 140 Character Limit with Frequency.
I really hate when people I follow tweet something over multiple tweets. If you have to use more than say.. 2 tweets to say what you want to write a blog post! Twitter is a SHORT medium and when I have to read 4-12 tweets to get your point you are clearly missing missing it! Do this daily and the unfollow button is in your future!
2.You are only Tweeting to plug your own website/blog.
I love following bloggers and people who run their own websites but I loath it when I follow someone and all their posts are:
“Have a new blog post up check it out [Link]” or “Hey check out my latest product review here [Link]”
Twitter is about interacting and engaging with the community. Hell the reason I joined twitter was so I could follow my favourite bloggers.So sure let us know when you update your website/blog (I do) but post about your day, let me get to know you, that is why I followed you, If I want to know when you have updated i'll either check your website or my RSS feed!
3.You use hashags excessively.
Hashtagging is useful for following topics and contributing to the conversation on a specific topic but if your tweets look like this:
“OMG I just ate a waffle. #waffle #food #eating”
You clearly do not understand the point of hashtagging! Please google it and come back! Every time I see one of these tweets I grit my teeth and my finger hovers over the unfollow button.
4.You Nonstop Retweet (or only tweet to win free stuff)
Retweeting is one of my favourite ways of finding new people to follow, interesting things to read and great little one liners that make me literally laugh out loud. However if your whole feed reads is:
RT: @SomeoneElse
RT: @InterestingPerson
RT: @AGirlmoreinterestingthanME
with absolutely nothing in there from you (or very rarely anything from you) I am going to stop following you and start following them. I followed you because I thought you were interesting enough to give my time too. If you don’t post anything yourself its defeating the point just .. a lot. This also applies to incessant contest entry tweets as well.
5.Your Continuous Negativity.
Twitter is about tweeting your life, so some negativity is a given, my morning tweets are generally not filled with positivity and sunshine! Everyone has moments and days when everything just goes to crap. However when days and weeks worth of tweets amount to:
“Everything is crap. Seriously everyone around me just sucks!”
It gets very wearing and seeing huge amounts of negativity all the time is just is not why I use twitter. I used to feel guilty about doing this but realised that in my real life I try to surround myself with positive influences so my twitter experience shouldn't be any different!
6.Your tweets are completely indecipherable (or you swear like a sailor)
140 characters is limiting and sometimes resorting to chat speak is the only way to cut down a tweet enough to get it through. However when I have to spend 5 minutes deciphering what you are trying to say then it defeats the point of tweetng in the first place.
Tweets are supposed to be a quick communication tool and if it takes me longer than 30 seconds to get what you are trying to communicate the point is lost. Do it often enough and I will unfollow you to save myself the trouble.
Also huge amounts of swearing. I swear on occasion but gratuitous use of the “F” word is just annoying and when every tweet reads like friday night at the pub with bikies then it gets boring extremely quickly! Any use of the “C” word is also a instant unfollow!
7.You’re just not very interesting...
Being on twitter involves a certain amount of ego. I mean you have to believe people are going to want to follow you and be interested in your everyday happenings! Twitter is supposed to be fun and interesting. If you tweets don’t interest me I will stop following you.
I read 90% of the tweets of the people I follow. I reply to things that pique my curiosity or when I think I have something to add. I genuinely like all of the people I follow and interact with on a regular basis. If your tweets don't interest me, engage me or give me an idea of who you are then I am not going to keep following you.
I used to feel guilty about this one but realised that following someone I don't find interesting is silly and totally defeats the purpose of twitter! I wouldn't want someone to follow me just because they felt guilty about clicking a button!!!
8.You give just a little (or a lot) to much information.
I do not need to know you just went to the bathroom, that you have some sort of growth of your backside or that you and your partner are trying new stuff in bed! Twitter is a delicate balance of being Boring (Only tweeting about your breakfast and your cat) and tweeting everything. P. Diddys Mid Sex Tweet was WAY to much info and had I been following him I would of unfollowed him in a second. If your tweet makes me go “ewwww” and then not laugh I’m probably not going to keep following you for long!
9.You Tweet about how many followers you have.
This one is for people who do it on a daily basis.. sometimes more than once a day. When your goal on twitter is just to get followed it stops being about community and starts being a popularity contest. I follow few celebs, and a couple of high profile bloggers and webcomics artists, apart from that most of the people I follow are small time twitterers like myself who do it for fun. So if you start posting your numbers on a daily basis expect that number to go down by at least one because I don't want to just be a number in a herd!!!
What about you tweeple? What makes you unfollow people? Do you feel bad about unfollowing people? Or do you blithely click that button and never look back?
For more on twitter check out my post "A Twitter over Twitter" [Here] and "10 Signs your addicted to Twitter"[Here]
Miss Addict
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