I use Twitter for quite a while now, mostly for professional reasons – I hardly write about things not related to my design work or any other work I’m currently doing, mostly because I treat Twitter as just another way to promote what I do. I cannot say (yet) if I’m successful in promoting my brand around “the interwebs”, but so far I really like the way that Twitter allows you to network.
Still, I seen some things on Twitter that guarantee 100% that you will get unfollowed by me even if I’m the one that you decided to follow. Here’s the list.
- Use reply-bots – that’s an absolute no-no. Receiving “Thanks for following me!” notice from a bot does not show that you care about me following you. Honestly, it shows the exact opposite of that – it shows that you don’t give a crap to the point that you can’t even write few words. If you want to bot-reply me, don’t reply at all.
- Be a frenzied fanatic – don’t get me wrong. I love people with passion. I hate people who are so blinded with it that they don’t see arguments against it. Whatever you’re tweeting about, don’t go all out to the extent that makes me think that not agreeing with you will make you burn a cross in my garden.
- Spam – and I do not mean only XXX pictures or Viagra. If you’re tweeting in name of your company and you have this awesome product feel free to advertise it, yeah. But don’t do it every day using the same tweet! I know it’s awesome and stuff, but I get it, right? I don’t need to be hammered with it every day and I will not buy it if you spam me with it, okay? Thanks in advance!
- Be a liar – if your description tells me that you love bringing ideas into life, you love bringing value to the world and stuff, and then you tweet mostly like “Just woke up” or “Just had a huge dump” – that’s not bringing value. That’s bringing noise. I don’t like noise, so we’ll have to say goodbye.
- Teach me how to make money/followers on Twitter – seriously. I don’t care if you made $100.000 on Twitter by following all Ashton’s followers and for just few dollars you can tell me how to do it. You made your $100.000 because there are people that actually believe in stuff like this. I follow people who have something interesting to say or show and I won’t follow blindly just to get more followers, ergo, more “money”.
- Hashtag inappropriately – hashtags are great thing, especially with EventBox allowing me to follow everyone using them, which makes them more IRC channel style. Still, if you’re promoting your blog post about 101 ways to mate rabbits and tag it with #design, I feel urge to get a rusty screwdriver and go berserk. Since killing people with rusty objects probably won’t be widely accepted, I’ll probably stick to putting you on my blocked list without hesitation.
Well, that’s basically it. If you are followed by me but you don’t like me and want to get rid of me, feel free to use any combination from the list above. ;)
Quite good list, although I hardly disagree with 4th point. Just because someone loves to bring value, doesn’t mean he’s gonna do it in every minute of his life. Besides, mainly purpose of Twitter is answering the question we all know, so I wouldn’t say that actually doing that is a bad thing.
Also, thing I’d throw at the top of this list – if lot of your tweets begins with ‘RT’, you’re out.
@eraevion: if someone says he likes to bring value and mostly talks about kind of poo he had today, he’s out.
Btw. I do a lot of re-tweets, cause I like to share further things that I find interesting and that’s mostly what I use Twitter for, so… no ;)