8 Reasons I won’t follow you on Twitter.

This is not a definitive guide. It’s not meant to be. These are my reasons for not following certain people back when they follow me on Twitter, and I look forward to hearing what yours are.

If you are on Twitter you’ll be used to experiencing this every day. You receive an email from Twitter themselves. You open it and you see that JoeSoap or JaneDoe from Florida or Kalgoorli has just followed you. You have three choices.

1. You can ignore the mail and get on with your life.
2. You can block the person from ever contacting you again, or
3. You can click through to their page and decide whether to follow them back or not.

If you are brand new to Twitter you’ll do well to avoid the following while you are first getting going. Once you are well into the swing of things and you are a regular tweeter, just go ahead and do what works for you.

So, let’s jump in – here are 8 reasons I won’t follow you on Twitter.

1. You have no profile pic loaded. This could be your own pic, your logo or even a funny pic you found somewhere. Just load something catchy. “Anonymous” does not equal social.

2. Your bio is blank. Have something in your bio. Why wouldn’t you post a little bit about yourself, even if it is tongue in cheek? If you have nothing to say about yourself – how social are you being?

3. You post 10 times in 2 minutes. Seriously. My Twitter feed page is my dipstick into the thoughts of a whole bunch of people I have chosen to follow. There are only 20 tweets on my page and when they leave there they’re pretty much gone forever. If you hog half the screen with your profound ten thoughts in two minutes, you’re crowding my tribe out.

4. You try to sell me something before we have even met. Particularly when this is in every one of your posts. I know nothing about you. If you walked up to me at a party and said “hi, would you like to buy a vacuum cleaner” the answer would be no. The answer on Twitter is no too.

5. You don’t post anything before you start following everyone. Here’s a rule of thumb – post at least a dozen times before you follow anyone you don’t know. It’s fine to invite your colleague and your mum cause they love you already. If you are following 870 people and you have 1 post…what’s that about?

6. Your follow ratio looks sad. Keep a healthy balance between the number of people that you follow and the number that are following you. If you have 1000 followers and you are following 100 people good for you. Your posts are probably interesting. However, if you have 56 followers and you are following 1467 people, what does that say to me? You’re unpopular. Your tweets are probably crappy. I’ll trust the Twitter community vote and hit the delete button.

7. OK, a cool name does help. Take for example @whatbigtweets that followed me the other day. I had to smile. And a profile pic to match. I was tempted…but the tweets just didn’t quite do it for me. Delete.

8. You confuse Twitter for an email snippets programme. If you do this you’re kinda missing the point of Twitter. If your entire tweet screen is filled with cryptic response messages to people that only you know, that only they will understand, why would I want to be part of that noise?

blahdeblah Thanks for the tip!
yadeya OK, next time for sure.
rhubarb Gotcha!
blahdeblah Now that’s an idea!

What are your pete peves? I’m listening.