A few quick ways to make sure I don’t follow you on Twitter.
I use twitter daily. Not only do I post my recent blog posts, interesting articles, retweets of other’s tweets, and my thoughts, but I use it to get story ideas.
But I have a few pet peeves:
1. My main pet peeve is someone who follows you just to try to get you to follow them back. Follow me because you’re interested in what I have to say, not because you want me to follow you back. The worst are people that follow you and notice you aren’t following them back, who then unfollow and refollow to try to get your attention again.
2. Another pet peeve sure to get you unfollowed is posting too often. There’s no magic number to me, but I’ve unfollowed a lot of people who tweet every few minutes (unless I find them very relevant).
3. The third pet peeve is the person who only posts ads about their business. Like this one. That doesn’t add value.
So here’s how I decide to follow someone back that follows me. First, if I know the person or company I’ll likely follow them back. But 99% of the time I don’t. So then I look at two numbers: number of followers and number following. The ratio is what’s important. If they are following more people than are following them, that’s a red flag. That’s a good sign they aren’t very interesting.
Right now I have about 1,000 followers and I’m following 126 people. That’s about 10 to 1. When I see someone who’s following 1,000 people and only has 100 followers, that’s a red flag, and I won’t follow them back.
What are some of your pet peeves on twitter? How do you decide who to follow?
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Lee H. says
I agree with every one of those. The only addition I have, which goes along with excessive tweeting, is when a person connects their twitter account to every social network they are in. Just causes tweet overload.
Kellie says
Is that really what people are doing in #1?? I just thought they were fickle. Weird.
For our feed I finally turned off the notifications on new followers so that isn’t a problem for us.
Andrew Allemann says
Kellie – I’ve seen sites that promote that as a way to get the attention of people who don’t follow you back.
Kellie says
huh. Crazy. You’re right – that’s annoying as hell. I also, unfollow anyone who DM me immediately after I follow them to say “hi and looking forward to hearing what you have to say”. Uh huh.
Robert Haastrup-Timmi says
Andrew, the whole follow you or follow me thing is narcissism at the moment. It really doesn’t amount to very much unless the followers are friends or a very targeted vertical audience.
But here is something I urge you to look at… have you noticed how Google is now slipping Twitter Tweets into google search results? I noticed because I searched my domain “Tweet Lawyers” on google today and not only does my twitter page come up twitter.com/tweetlawyers , but now google is actually showing relevant tweets in realtime!! That seems remarkable as I also own TweetLawyers.com …hmmm what does all this mean going forward??
I thought i’d give you and other domainers heads up…could be very interesting going forward if you own keyword names with a twitter page. Now that’s no pet peeve!
Lance says
I unfollow people who repeatedly DM me with junk/spam.
BF says
My question to you Andrew is what made you decide to remove the ReTweet button that was previously located on the top of each post here?
Andrew Allemann says
BF – good question. It suddenly started acting weird, not showing the correct retweet graphic. It’s on my ‘to do’ list to figure out what happened and get it back up there.
rob sequin says
Thank god I’m not on Twitter.
Is it all just noise?
I’ve been on Linked In for about ten years with two accounts and hundreds of contacts and never ONCE have I ever seen any value in it.
I guess social networking is not for me.
BF says
Andrew – I did notice techcrunch originally used the button you had up, then changed over to a new one, which I think is provided by twitter themselves, but not sure.
Andrew Allemann says
BF – thanks for the tip. I just switched to the same plugin TechCrunch uses, topsy. We’ll see how it goes.
michelle says
Agreed Andrew. Seriously – its annoying to get too many updates from one person/company – maybe one good update a day would be more helpful. I actually had to remove someone from my mobile updates.
Mark says
I assume Alexander Graham Bell believed voice was superior to text. If he was right, why are we so enamored with the sms version of the telegraph system in 2011?” I’m surprised that each sentence doesn’t end with the word “STOP”.
While technology can instantly convert between voice and text, voice brings more to the human experience than any other communication technology.
Pure Mobile Social Voice Networks (with emphasis on voice) is where the future is headed. If Twitter and Facebook don’t evolve that way, certainly others will.
Follow this evolution:
1. Text tweets.
2. Voice Tweets.
3. Followers listen in real time to live voice tweets (Sort of like Twitter Radio). Tweets can be voice actuated, push to talk or open microphone based. Web cam optional.
4. Live, real time, two-way tweets between the FOLLOWERS and the FOLLOWED. Text list displays queue of each FOLLOWER’S user names holding for his or her opportunity to extemporaneously voice tweet (i.e., talk) with the objects of their Tweeting obsession while the rest of the FOLLOWER world listens in.
It would be like talk radio with a social networking twist.
Imagine the following occurring as voice, in real time, with a voice actuated headset:
@aplusk* (voice): Damn, I stubbed my toe!
[@aplusk looking at his voice enabled “followers in queue” list]
@aplusk (voice): “Jim you ever stubbed your toe?”
@Jim* (voice): Yeah, it hurts like hell. Put ice on it fast!
@aplusk (voice): “No can do. I gotta be outa here in 5 minutes.”
Of course, all of @aplusk’s followers were also able to listen in to this live unfolding drama. All the regular text stuff can still go on, but it’s voice that takes center stage. For those who weren’t present, the entire event would be archived as both voice and text for later consumption.
Think of it as Twitter with the added capabilities of CB Radio, Police Radio and Talk Radio. Think how boring the latter three would be if they were presented only as text.
* user names for demonstration purposes only. No actual event depicted herein.
Jeff Schneider says
Hello Elliot,
We feel Twitter is populated with so many trouble makers , manipulators and other forms of Whiners , it just isn’t worth the effort to market there. Creative Minds, and thoughts are destroyed by detractors Poisonous Sabotage. NOT the place for Most creative thinkers. JAS