David Wright is a direct response copywriter and marketing specialist at Ghostwriter Dad. Follow him @bloggerdad
Twitter is a lot like the wild west of social media. The venue is relatively new, many people are unfamiliar with the etiquette and an even larger number of people could care less about the few rules in place. Which is why I am quick to my trigger and hit the block or unfollow button the minute people’s poor Twitter manners cross my path.
Here are six ways to become a Twitter pariah with me (and I imagine a lot of other people):
1) Send out offers on how to increase Twitter followers. Especially if you have less followers than me. Come on.
2) Repeat the same self-promoting tweet over and over. One follower I have seems to repeat the same tweet every time I sign on about something I couldn’t care less about if I tried. We get it, you don’t need to tell us about this “incredible limited time offer” eight million times. Obviously, the offer can’t be too incredible or limited if you’re tweeting about it every time I sign on.
3) Send me porn. Only on the web do you have complete strangers offering you free pornography. I’ve never been walking down the street and bombarded by sexy women throwing themselves at me, though I would have killed for that when I was a teenager. Spam, viruses and shadiness aside, porn on Twitter is just plain tacky.
4) Send me a link to your business without having ever tweeted to me before. Nothing makes me hate you more than a blatant and unsolicited tweet to “check out” your site. Seriously, every time I get one of these, I secretly hope that whoever sent it is cursed by a disease which prevents them from typing. This is bad, not to mention, lazy marketing. Unless I am asking for information about the product you’re selling, keep your tweets to yourself.
5) Tweet only slightly less than you breathe. Seriously, if I’m looking at your avatar every time I open TweetDeck, you’re tweeting too much. Go for a walk or crack open a book, just take a break. And PLEASE, don’t tweet, “Off to take a break from Twitter.” Just go.
6) Act like a robot. It’s okay to use an automation tool here or there, but if your Twitter feed is being run by Skynet, people can tell. I want a human on the other side of the tweets, not a robot scheduled to say “something funny” at 12:06.
In the real world, it isn’t so easy to put up with the personalities that annoy us. On Twitter it is as easy as the click of a button. Make sure you are tweeting in the way you would expect others to tweet.
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@jasondrohn
“Go for a walk or crack open a book” – I like it :0)
Good advice David. I too have become quite fed up with all the BS on twitter. From blatant self promotion to just plain bad manners, it’s no wonder 40% of all the people who sign up for Twitter don’t come back… Thank God Tweetdeck has the ‘Groups’ feature.
– Jason
Also, 7) steer clear of viral games that spam your contacts, like Mobster World
@mtthwdyr
Nicely put.
@barbaraling
You missed one of the most blatant – invite a bazillion people to become a member of your “Mafia family.”
HATE THOSE!!!!!
@acbowen
So true. Thanks for this!
I’d also add that most people at one time or another have been guilty of #5 – but it’s the repeat offenders that are the worst. Once in a while, if there’s breaking news or you’re at an exciting talk or something? Sure – since I can just put you on mute if I’m not interested. Every day? Not so much.
Manners and common sense go a long way. Even (especially?) online.
@randomphobia
You are a funny mentor for many people I believe and I wished much more would have read your 6 quick tips on twitter. I’m relatively new with this kind of “social thing” but I start to enjoy it. Sometimes it feels like I can be very close to people, e.g. you – in another moment I realize that you are in the US and me in Europe, not even talking to each other or being able to due to timezones…
@hospitalera
Bad tweets like those you described made me set my tweets to private (gets magically rid of all the @spam) and to weed through the people I used to follow. If I don’t find anything interesting in their last page of tweets, they get unfollowed, sorry, bye, end of story
SY
@nwjerseyliz
I check out each new follower and I hate when I see someone issue the same 3 or 4 Tweets every 3-6 hours. The idea is trying to blanket all time zones of when people use Twitter but if you’re on Twitter a lot, it means that you’ll get duplicates or triplicates of the same message which is tedious when it is all self-promotional. I guess this is a double offense, a blend of #2 and #6.
But the number one way to be a pariah is to follow people and then unfollow them in order to accumulate followers (who auto-follow) but keep your own following list low. You can tell when a user is following only a couple hundred people but have thousands (or tens of thousands) of followers. They are only following you to unfollow in another day or two. It’s a waste of my time to check them out since they are not really interested in reading my Tweets any way.
@hospitalera
Just re-tweeted this, hope it helps, btw, yes the mafia-family one is a real no-brainer-to-unfollow for me also
SY
@JoeCrockett
Be a sweet tweet or Tweet unto others as you would have tweeted unto you. The golden rule works so well for so many “relationship” and “social” things in life.
@propsblog
This is like the list of my biggest peeves!
@liz – I totally disagree with you. There are some people that I follow, read their tweets, and unfollow. Just because someone has a ton of followers and aren’t following many people don’t mean they are trying to cheat the system (there are trying to build followers trading follows are too lazy to unfollow people who follow them).
I particularly hate seeing the same exact RT from the same person over and over.. I just unfollowed 5-6 people form my list like that today.
@bloggerdad
Glad you all liked the post. Thank you for the nice words and RT’s.
@jason I really need to try one of the tweet programs, though from what I’ve read, most of them drag down system resources. Can you recommend a good one?
@Heinz Yeah, I don’t get those games at all.
@Matthew Thank you. Nicely said.
@Barbara Yeah, I call in favors with the real mafia to deal with those people.
@Charlotte There’s been a few times I’ve been guilty of this one. I go through days or weeks of not being on Twitter and then I have a bit of free time and see a bunch of people I know happen to be on and then get all silly like a dog when its owners come home. Only I don’t pee on the carpet. Usually.
@Frederik Thanks. And yes, the web is awesome for bridging incredible distances, isn’t it?
@hospitalera Well said, though there is a whole other school of thought that says if you set your account to private, people won’t bother to try and subscribe.
@Liz I’ve never thought about that. Usually when I see a high follower to a low follow ratio, I assume that the person is pretty selective about who they follow. My ratio is skewed for that reason. Typically, I don’t follow back unless the person either engages me or I see that they’re tweeting about things I’m interested in or they’re really funny.
@Joseph Yes it does.
Twitter used to be the Wild-West. But now it’s gone mainstream. Celebrities, TV shows, baseball teams, Oprah…hell, EVERYONE does it.
If you subtract the social-media douchebags, snake-oil salesmen, self-promoters and rod chafers (who promote the self-promoters), how many “real people” are out there? Those who actually just show up to chat and have FUN?
Right now, I’m counting maybe 23.
@puregroove_org
–good stuff, man. I feel the same way.
@thecoveted
i’m so glad i’m not the first or second person to mention mafia family… while we’re at it…all those other facebook-y gift, game, quiz links…which i really hate in facebook… and even more in twitter.
@sticky_media
Absolutely right David, although I suspect that this advice will fall on many deaf ears given that the perpetrators will have already set up their automated spam feeds and won’t be reading!
#5 is a good one for human Tweeters though.
@sticky_media
Absolutely right David, although I suspect that this advice will fall on many deaf ears given that the perpetrators will have already set up their automated spam feeds and won’t be reading!
#5 is a good one for human Tweeters though.
@bronwyndurand
I really like ‘Twitter pariah’ as a description. I’m sorry I missed your post when I did my tongue- in-cheek 25 unfollow behaviours, (http://bit.ly/cTX71) I’d have liked to include the ‘check out my site’ crazies. Thanks for the post.
@linnea4591
Porn is my biggest hate for on twitter….just lame, gets BLOCKED right from the start. I won’t even go to their profile if I know or even think it seems to be porn. If I do make it to the profile, have a link to a blog or a personal website AND include the bio…always intereting to know something about the person. AND what is this with having just 1 or 2 tweets with over a hundred followers…
THIS was a great artical, one I have bookmarked to return to at later date.
@heathero
Love it! Although I have to confess that the other day I DID tweet “taking a computer break, going to take a walk on this beautiful day!”
Nothing turns me off faster than seeing “I got more followers at..” (esp. if I just started following them!)
I know that the app sends it (usually unbeknowned to the user), but it still makes me feel like they tricked me somehow – like they might as well be saying “gotcha!”
this is second only to:
DM’ing me “thanks for following, now go to my website” which truly is among the most insulting things on twitter (IMHO!)
If only people would think about “what would this look like in real life?”
Great POST! I will be sharing it with my “students!”
Oh, and remember that it’s called SOCIAL networking not ROBO-networking! LOL
@oldschoolseo
#1 is one of my non-favorite favorites (if that makes sense). I had a guy send me info on acquiring “a massive # of twitter followers”. The problem (aside from the fact that I don’t want just massive number of followers), is that it simply wasn’t working for him (he had less than 100 followers). Even worse, he was touting himself as a Social Media Expert.
@NicksTraffic
Can we add to the list “Kill Follow Friday”? Or at least change it to #SingleFollowFriday (Learn what this is: http://nickstraffictricks.com/1111_lets-change-followfriday-to-singlefollowfriday/ )
@Trudi_N
It surprises me that swearing or being crude isn’t mentioned as a quick way to get blocked. I love words, and I don’t have a hate on for people who swear occasionally, but I really think that someone should have the courtesy of knowing me before being casually profane. It may not mean anything to you, but public swearing is like ear pollution.