I’ve been on Twitter for a year and a half or so, and it never ceases to amaze me how unsophisticated the majority of my new followers could be. During the course of my Twitter career, I’ve had the pleasures of following some of the greatest Social Media gurus, search engine optimization experts, and a ton of others in the web industry. Whatever community you belong to, there will always be moronic spammers that have no interest in anything except exploiting the community just to promote their garbage products.
Many new tweeters make the same mistakes, over and over again:
1. Useless Tweets - Telling me that you got up to get a glass of water at 10:45pm from txt, and then Sitting back down at your desk at 10:46 is absolutely unnecessary. Please do yourself a favor and spare us the small details of your life. Now, if on your way to get a glass of water, you happen to see a wildfire break out across the street, then by all means, Tweet about it. If your Twitter following has anyone in your local area, it could be important for them to know.
2. Default Profile Picture - This is a dead giveaway to let everyone you follow that you are brand-new-this-very-day, a spammer, or just a moron. It takes less than 45 seconds to upload a photo of yourself, and use the Twitter profile picture cropper to make a good snapshot.
3. Default Twitter Color Scheme - This is not as big of a deal as the profile picture, but if you want people to follow you, you better show that you are different than every other useless Tweeter out there. Use a solid color if you can’t get a good layout. Mix it up a bit!
4. Following to Followed Ratio - Ok, we know not to follow you because you are following 500 people, and only 9 following you. Oh, and your 3 updates which provide nothing substantial. Avoid it. Search for people you have something in common with at first. Converse with people using the @reply function. It’s not hard, you just have to think of the big picture.
5. Empty Bio - When you give no indication of who you are, where you are located, or even what you are interested in, you are disadvantaging yourself from the get-go. Take the minute-and-a-half it takes to complete your small biography.
6. A Link to Your MySpace/Facebook Profile - Congratulations, you’ve indicated that you’re in a popularity contest.
7. Your Updates are Completely, and Utterly Useless - You may think that everyone on earth is dumber than a bag of rocks, with the exception of you. Sorry to say, you’re very wrong. You cannot fool us twitter/internet/social media savvy folk with your affiliate link to the Acai Berry offer that you are so desperate to promote. I garuntee you will get no leads via Twitter by just spamming.
8. Every Tweet You Make is Loaded with Hashtags - Because you think you are oh-so-smart, you try to take advantage of Twitter’s Search function, but loading your moronic Tweets with #hashtags. It’s not only irritating to look at, but when you have more than two hashtags in a single Tweet, I am less inclined to accept you as a follower.
9. Flooding your Tweets - This is probably the most irritating thing to see. If you are using a Mac, with Twitteriffic, and Growl notifications, it’s infuriating to see a flood of your updates filling my screen. Your tweets are full of links, either to social media, or direct news sources, but CMON! Yes, it is important to share social media stuff on Twitter because it gets it promoted, but I feel like doing murder when you flood. Don’t be a flooder.
My hopes are to help those of you that have just recently joined the Twitter community, to become better at it, and to be less annoying. This should increase your followers slowly and steadily over time. As someone that does internet marketing Victoria, I can say Twitter is a great tool to know how to use well, to get the most out of your retweets.
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