Originally published on Conversations & Connections, my SAS social media blog
I’m certainly not the first person to give reasons why I choose not to follow people on Twitter, but there are a few Twitter habits “twabits?” that particularly annoy “twannoy?” me, in addition to the habit of making up new words by tacking a "tw" on the front “tweologizing?”.
1. You aren’t using your real name. This one bugs me in all social media channels. I know it’s not always possible to get your name as a user name “believe me, David B. Thomas, I know it can be hard to get common names”, but you can at least use some variation of a real name. There are very few people I follow who use an alias or nom de twit, and the ones I do at least are very clear in their profiles who they are. In short, I want to follow real people.
2. You don’t have a picture of yourself. And it’s not just that you don’t have a photo at all. I want to see a picture of you, not your pet. And as much as I love babies, I’ll go to your Flickr page to see your kids.
3. I don’t care what you had for lunch unless you link to the recipe for what you made, or a review of the restaurant where you ate. And I can’t think of any way you can make interesting the news that you missed your bus, unless it can’t stop because it can’t go slower than 55.
4. You tweet a lot of mystery links. Don’t just throw in a TinyURL and say "This is interesting." There are maybe three people in the whole world whose taste and interests are enough like mine that I would accept that. Give me a hint what it is I’ll be seeing if I choose to click on your link out of the dozens being suggested by the other people I’m following.
5. You don’t include any context. If all I see in your stream are tweets like "@scobleizer Yes! Exactly!" I’m probably not going to follow you.
6. I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. Maybe 20 percent of the tweets I see make little or no sense because they are poorly written, spelled, punctuated and shoehorned into 140 characters. It’s a challenge to write clearly and concisely, but it’s fun, too.