Coming purely from the perspective of a “Follower” on Twitter, my last two posts have addressed some of the things that make me “unfollow” people. Here are some short random things I hate, most of which will make me eventually unfollow you.
1. Posting quotations from other people (usually famous) with no explanation as to why you are posting them. Unless your site was created simply to post quotations, why do you do this?
2. Double-posting to another format (Facebook, etc.) where you can use more words, so that I have to go from Twitter to your Facebook page to read the rest of the sentence. Just no.
3. Going over the character count (how do you even do that?) so that if I want to retweet, I have no room to add a comment.
4. Tweeting more than 3 or 4 comments in less than a couple of minutes. Especially retweeting more than 4 things in a row. And the more often you do this, the more annoyed I get. I’ve seen people retweet a dozen things in a row, filling up my page. And then do it again two hours later. Often the same things! So you know, I tend to ignore all your posts when you do this, and if you do it a lot, I’ll eventually unfollow, even if I like you. (Okay, you get a pass from me if you’re tweeting from a live event like a baseball game, concert, etc., and I know going in you that you do that.)
5. Having two different accounts, but tweeting or retweeting exactly the same thing from both accounts at virtually the same time. Why do you have two accounts again? At least space them out. Naturally, I will eventually unfollow one of them.
6. Retweeting every single nice thing anyone says about you or your book, music, speaking, etc. Okay, so they like you. We get it already. Please space them out and only retweet a few per day.
7. Tweeting about how many people followed or, especially, unfollowed, you. Who cares?
8. Tweeting “Thanks for the follow” and then listing 5 or 10 or more ids. Sorry, I don’t get the point. Why exactly do I need to know this?
Thanks very much, Maria. I think we all come to social media from a different perspective and what bothers one person might not bother another depending on that perspective.
In this instance, I’m trying to think particularly in terms of a writer or blogger who wants to be read or a singer who wants to be heard, and what works best or doesn’t work from my point of view as a reader/listener.
I’ve never really thought about this before, but now that you have pointed out these “pains” I can truly say, “yes, very annoying”. I think many who tweet do not really understand the real purpose and many tweet just for the sake of doing so. The mentality may very well be , everyone’s doing it, so why shouldn’t I?
I’ve actually learned from this, so keep up the blogging. I wonder what’s next.