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9 Reasons Why You Aren’t Being Followed on Twitter
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.
Yikes! I better get my photo updated from the default. I’m not a spammer or a moron. Hopefully those following me aren’t either.
Well, that’s what everyone keeps mentioning to me. I personally don’t think that there are different levels of Twitter. I follow 500 odd people and tweet about personal stuff, links, blog promotion, projects like #TwitLight [sorry for the ad!], work related things and the like. I connect to everyone from RL friends, internet ‘friends’, strangers, family, co-workers, housemates, celebrities on mine plus tweet about a wide range of hobbies from gaming to music to reading and knitting. And I’ve used Twitter at conferences/meetups or even just to say I’ll be late to dinner with whoever I’m meeting up with in a @reply/DM.
So personally I don’t feel like I fit any ‘shoe’ and it always seems that people want to put other Twitterers into boxes for convenience when in many cases that’s not the case.
monnettemon
That rarely happens though or rather I’ve noticed that the people I’m following have a very wide variety of interests.
Heidi:
And who says ‘I’m going for a coffee’ isn’t valuable? On one hand it means the person’s afk for a while thus unreachable. Or tweets about the weather as there’s some kind of ritual with some of the more photography enthusiasts on my Twitter that post a picture of the sunrise/weather every morning. Or going to bed which again indicates someone won’t be around to answer a query.
I suppose [and bear with me, need more coffee, brain isn't working yet!] it also comes down on your views of Twitter as publishing vs dialogue tool. According to Twanalyst my conversation % is around 85%.
That quote from monettenom sums it up pretty well though, too many people these days seem to just raise their finger and claim what can and cant be done, especially now that Twitter’s literally jumping the shark.
My original comment wasn’t fully directed at this post, more at the situation in general and I’ve so far been unable to gather my thoughts enough to make my own blog post about it!
Just re read my comment and realise it may be coming across as a bit confrontational which is definitely not intended! I’m not a morning person..
Also, has this blog’s theme changed since yesterday?
@Cat
Yeah, new blog, still undergoing certain design changes, it’s only going to improve from here on out!
@admin – Good choice going with Thesis for the redesign… Anywhoo
You can also add:
DON’T RETWEET EVERYTHING YOU SEE… I have seen people RT what other people had for breakfast. WTF?!? What is the importance of that?!?
Good stuff
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i couldn’t agree with you more about the reasons why people aren’t being followed on twitter,who wants to know that they woke up @ like 2 in the morning to go to the bathroom or get a drink and couldn’t get back to sleep? LAME!,or that their bored and have nothing to do,everyone including myself gets bored every now and again but that’s why i joined twitter to make new friends and maybe expand my coffee biz by making people aware of it!,that’s what i think people should use twitter for instead of posting useless garbage like the above stated! lol awesome blog look forward to reading another lol maybe this blog will open people’s eyes and show them what their doin wrong lol,feel free to follow me on twitter if you like (Kita82)
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Great advice. Social networking is a brand-new thing for me and as a Newbie I’m not up on what’s acceptable and what’s frowned upon. A little guidance is appreciated by those of us who are still trying to “learn the ropes”. Cheers!
Great tips, advice and info – I myself have actually made a few of these beginner mistakes, and am on my way to Twitter success after reading these crucial tips. Thanks a lot Bhlaab!
ok, sometimes I am guilty for Hashtags overusing
but the rest should apply for me 
Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The words in your post seem to be running off the screen in Opera. I’m not sure if this is a format issue or something to do with web browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let you know. The style and design look great though! Hope you get the issue resolved soon. Kudos
im a 19 years old student , i weigh 102 pounds and 5.4 ,, im on 1650 calories which is the calories i need to maintain my weight ,but i started eating 1600 to 1650 and still feel kinda tired , and im doing it by eating only indomie , or instant noodles each back has 350 , and i think they have no vitamins , so whats a better way to eat but still eat 1650 calories ,not more