- TrueTwit Validation – Seriously. Do you really get so many spam accounts trying to follow you that you need people to validate that they’re human? Not to mention, who cares if they follow you? Don’t follow back or lock your account, problem solved.
- Listing Your Twitter Stats – “4 New Followers, 8 Mentions, 13K Mention Reach, 8 Replies.” FYI – nobody cares.
- Offers to Buy Followers – Number 1, maybe it’s just me, but the thought of buying Twitter followers just strikes me as kinda pathetic. Number 2, your pitch would be more convincing if you had more than 183 followers yourself.
- Asking me to retweet – If you want me to retweet your stuff, get to know me first or provide eye-catching content. Although if you were doing the latter you wouldn’t need to ask for the retweets in the first place.
- Asking me to retweet without following me first – Now you’ve gone from tacky to downright rude. If you want me to do you a favor, at least follow and interact with my content first. It’s very sad that your brother is dying of cancer and needs money to pay the bills. However, I don’t know you from the man in the moon, therefore, I’m not going to retweet what could very well be a scam to all of the people who have followed me.
- Get Openly Pissed-Off When People Don’t Favorite or Retweet Your Posts – In my mind this is the equivalent of running to mommy because the kids on the playground are ignoring you. Some tweets will be popular, some won’t. That’s the nature of the game. If you want better interaction, invest your time in developing a following that is tailored to your interests.
- Pitching – If I walked up to you at a party and said hi, would you immediately try to sell me on your book/blog/podcast/business? No, we would get to know each other first. Twitter should be the same way. If I get a DM seconds after following you that pitches something you do, chances are the only action that that DM will inspire me to do, is unfollow you.
- Book Marketing ad nauseam – there is nothing that makes me hit the unfollow button faster than looking at my feed and seeing that it is flooded by someone obnoxiously marketing their book, or retweeting dozens of other people’s book marketing posts. If I wanted ads, I would watch TV. The rule of thumb that I’ve heard, and agree with, is that only 1 out of every 7 posts should be marketing. So if you want to tweet 10 marketing posts every day, than you’d better come up with 70 other tweets (articles of interest, funny quips, pictures, retweets of a non-promotional nature, anything that isn’t selling a product!) to mix in and break it up.
- Picking Fights – It’s a big world, there is no way that we’re all going to get along and agree on all topics. However, doing searches on topics you feel strongly about, and then picking fights with people you’ve never interacted with before is shady and uncalled for. I don’t seek you out to rain on your parade, so don’t come rain on mine. It’s just gonna get you blocked!
- #FF – Friday Follows are great, but when you put the hashtag followed by 12 people with no explanation of why they should be followed it’s just obnoxious. Especially when the other 11 people mentioned all favorite and retweet the post which clogs up my notifications feed all day.
So there you have it, my biggest Twitter pet peeves. If I’ve unfollowed you, it’s probably because you did one of the above . . . or I hit the wrong button . . .