Before you begin reading this post I am having a grumpy old man moment and pointing out all the things that I have found to be quite irritating whilst using Twitter for my first year and I imagine must annoy others. I share my moaning moments with you in the hope that you won’t make the mistakes and instead make your Twitter account a highly influential social media account that will work for you and your business.
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Moaning Negative Statements – In day to day life no one likes a moaner or someone who puts others down and when on Twitter its the same ball game so avoid sharing your negative thinking on your social media platform at all costs otherwise you may find people start unfollowing you.
Political messages – likewise, everyone has their own idea of how the world should be run and what is right and wrong. It is best to have followers that agree with your way of thinking but to avoid upsetting anyone its best not to put any of your extreme political views on Twitter unless of course you are a politician! Its a risky tweet to tweet.
Validate you are a REAL Twitter user – Ever so often I get a DM ( direct message ) that says, please validate you are not a robot by following this link . It may only take around 20 to 30 seconds to validate but can I really be bothered and is there really a problem if a fake account follows you that happens to be a bot? Not really, you simply just dont follow them back. Its definitely a roll of the eyes moment.
The Egg – The first thing you should do when you start using Twitter is to create a profile and if possible design a good twitter background and profile picture in a clever and imaginative way that expresses your personality. If you remain an egg you are looked at as untrustworthy and not really worthy of following. If you have trouble designing a good profile then contact me and I will help you design a profile that reflects your personality or brand.
Hashtag junkie – #today #i #went #the #supermaket #and # bought #a #cabbage. When nearly every single word in a tweet is hash tagged it is seen by other users as spam. Hashtags do help get your content seen by more users but limit it to just a maximum of three hashtags.
Selfishness – me me meeeeeee! Yes we all want to be noticed and we all want to do more deals but to create relationships you need to help each other. Don’t just promote your own thoughts and products but be actively RT ( retweeting ) the tweets of others, the ones you find interesting and if you have used twitter lists maybe diversify how you share your tweets. For instance, monday could be ‘graphics’ day, tuesday could be ‘marketing’ and so fourth.
One good form of practice that is recommended by Twitter experts is for every one of your own pieces of content share 5 of others.
Tweeting like its going out of fashion – spending every waking moment on Twitter is not healthy and neither is tweeting 10 times in one minute. If people see your profile picture directly after each other in their feed they are likely to get fed up and unfollow you. Instead spread out your tweets throughout the day and put your most influential ones on your account when Twitter is at its most active ( around 2PM GMT).
Having few tweets compared to number of followers – 100,000 followers? Well done! That must have taken some time to build that kind of recognition especially with only 300 tweets, tell me how much you paid for that following. Twitter users aren’t stupid and if you are trying to deceive people into following you then its not a good start in building trust is it?
Tweets that add no value – informing the world you had cornflakes and orange juice for breakfast is not going to add value to your followers. What information do they really want? What do they want to feed on? Think a little before you tweet and try to provide things that you know others will benefit from.
Was it something I said? – people who follow you only to unfollow you a couple of weeks later to try and build their following/follower ratio will irritate the heck out of the users. Why add someone to your network only to unfollow them later? Doesn’t really make sense does it? If you want to keep track of who is unfollowing you use justunfollow.com.
Thanks for following! @myunclebob @davidthegnome @catsgroup – When you follow tweeps some users thank you for it. and tag you in a tweet with several other users. I understand its a form of trying to build a larger network but it doesn’t add anything to the majority of followers and will become irritating to see ‘thankyous’ regularly in your feed. The best way to say thank you is in a direct message in private rather than on the main feed.
In the next post I will discuss 11 ways to build appreciation for your tweets on Twitter.