For those of you that have been on Twitter for some time now I’m sure the list of people you follow is growing quite rapidly. Thus, the list grows, people will no doubt become a little more particular about who they follow and un-follow. Here’s a list that outlines a few things to keep in mind so you don’t get added to the un-follow list:
- No bio and a decent photo – Sorry but you need to convince me that you may actually be interesting and have something to say… /i need to kn ow who you are. chances are good that if you use a cartoon character or a stupid image of you giving me the “bird” that I likely won’t be compelled to follow you – the default Twitter avatar image is a really bad choice too!
- Posting Follow Friday lists excessively. The FF trick is fun but don’t simply blast out 5 or 10 tweets with lists of names. A simple follow this person with a short reason is much better.
- Cussing… if you repeatedly cuss in your tweets then you’ll likelly loose me
- auto tweet – if you simply push an RSS feed with 10 tweets at a time I’m not interested – unless your account clearly reveals that the account is a news bot.
- If you pretend to be an expert in a space that you clearly aren’t (like social media for example) I won’t follow you
- If you constantly retweet the same popular Twitter personalities (like Chris Brogan, Mashable, Guy Kawasaki) you’ll bore me… guess what, we already follow those peopl. Sure a few RTs are great, however, don;’t re-post everything they say.
- Butt kissing… there’s already a fair bit of kissing up on Twitter and its fairly obvious. The novice or wanna be “social media expert” is usually the worst culprit here!
- Begging for followers – if you constantly come right out and ask people to follow you and append “please RT” on every tweet I’m not interested
- Consumed by the numbers… if you follow 57,000 people and have 2,000 followers chances are good that you’re simply fishing for auto-followers and thus are likely not very interesting
- Excessive robot posting… be careful with the RSS feed push. If you slam your feed with 10 posts at a time you’ll definitely scare away followers.
