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14 Reasons I Won't Follow You On Twitter
By Meg Guiseppi | September 16, 2009
Follow Meg on Twitter
When I first joined Twitter, I was nearly obsessed with gaining followers and building up that number, just like so many newbies.
At first, I wasn’t entirely discriminating about who I followed, but now I am. I don’t care very much about the number. I’m much more interested in building mutually beneficial relationships and connecting with people I can learn from and share ideas with.
Although I don’t strictly adhere to these “rules”, here are some things that will likely keep me from following you:
1. If you have no photo. Even a poor quality photo of yourself is better than none.
2. If you have no bio. Who are you and what do you have to offer?
3. If your bio is loaded with typos or grammatical errors or doesn’t make sense to me.
4. If your bio is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. I don’t care how wonderful you are.
5. If your profile has no link to further info about you. I want to know who you are and if you’re legitimate.
6. If your tweets are mostly chit chat that doesn’t interest me or teach me anything.
7. If your tweets are mostly about how to get money or make thousands in minutes on the Internet by whatever method.
8. If your tweets are mostly self-promoting in an annoying way.
9. If I don’t like your politics.
10. If your niche and tweets are completely unrelated to mine.
11. If your tweets say over and over I can get 1,000 new Twitter followers a day if I follow your simple rules or buy something from you.
12. If you haven’t tweeted in, say, over a week or so.
13. If you follow and are followed by hundreds or thousands, but you’ve only tweeted maybe a dozen times all together.
14. If your profile in any way smacks of spam, pornography, violence, or anything against my sensibilities.
Do you have any absolute Twitter follower turn-offs?
February 4, 2010 – NOTE FROM MEG:
Check out my update over at Executive Career Brand, 14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter [Revisited]
Related series of posts:
Best of Twitter for Personal Branding and Executive Job Search
Topics: Networking, Online Identity, Social Media, Twitter | No Comments »
September 16th, 2009 at 8:41 am
I also stay away from Twitter accounts where they are obviously most interested in playing some online game. And that’s mostly the topic they Tweet about.
September 16th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Meg,
We’ll said. My favorite is #11.
Joel
September 16th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Thanks for commenting, Susan.
I forgot about those online gamers. I’m not interested in them either. They can have fun with their own crowd.
-Meg
September 16th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Thanks for your comment, Joel.
I suppose everyone has their own Twitter agenda and strategy. I’ll leave the professional Twitter follower-builders to those people who are more interested in metrics than substance.
-Meg
September 16th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Agreed about being selective on whom to follow. I’ll also not-follow or unfollow those who keep retweeting the same thing several times over, or every half hour for a day (just to make sure all of their followers see it on the first page!) and, unless the tweeter is an *excellent* aggregator and tweets stuff that is *almost always* of interest to me, someone who does nothing but RT other people’s stuff (in which case I may follow the aggregator but not the content originators)
September 16th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Thanks for commenting, tmana.
I don’t weed out those who mostly RT others. I feel the right RTs are very valuable and lead me to information I may not have otherwise found. I RT others a lot myself, along with tweeting my own blog posts and other original tweets.
As long as the RTs have substance, I’ll get right on board with that re-tweeter, and, of course, follow the original tweeter if I haven’t already.
-Meg
September 17th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Hi Meg,
Thank you for this thoughtful post. I find Twitter to be exciting in the way it allows people to get their message out to those who might not have heard it otherwise. In this type of open environment there will always be undesirable elements who invoke crummy feelings and have intent to spoil the communities we have built, but that only can happen if we let it.
Stay the course toward positivity and helping to improve your Twitter community, and for the jackasses; use the block function and don’t let them get you down.
September 17th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Thanks for joining the conversation, Jon. And thanks for following me on Twitter. I really love all you can do with Twitter. If I don’t have anything else really pressing, I’m happy to hang out there for an hour or so. People are tweeting about all kinds of interesting things!
-Meg
September 17th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
You are so right on! There isn’t one of your rules I don’t agree with and pretty much follow. I don’t care too much about the numbers, but the quality of my followers and who I follow. Thanks for a great piece on using Twitter.
Susan Berland
http://www.susan-berland.com
September 17th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
My pet peeve is the latest tactic of promoting a link and adding several twitter names to the post. If that’s their introduction, I block them.
Along the lines of #14 is that I won’t follow (or will unfollow) people with negative attitudes and foul mouths.
Twitter’s what you make of it – a community, a welcome distraction or just an overly noisy room. Thanks for a great post!
September 17th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Thanks for commenting, Shari.
That new tactic you mentioned has been happening to me a lot lately on Twitter. It was kind of horrifying at first – to think people may connect me with whatever junk that person is selling.
-Meg
September 17th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Thanks for your kind words, Susan.
I’m much happier now taking the time to investigate people before deciding whether to follow them. The more followers I get, the more discriminating I seem to become.
-Meg
September 17th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Thanks for sharing Meg! All good and true for me as well.
I ‘love’ the follows who when you check them out, have no posts whatsoever. They ‘have’ tweeps they are following, and maybe one or two tweeps following them (likely because of automation). Don’t just create a placeholder, say or share something for goodness sake… Or get off of Twitter, please!
September 17th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
I agree with all your comments and would like to add another one. People who send out a gazillion tweets in a row. My eyes glaze over and I end up skipping them or unfollowing them. Great tips!
JR Nuerge
Eco-friendly+Eco-nomical+Eco-fabulous!
http://www.jrnuerge.com
September 17th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Thanks for commenting, Kit.
I’m very leery of those who have thousands of followers, and follow thousands, but have only tweeted once or twice. They obviously have a very different Twitter strategy and agenda than I.
-Meg
September 17th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Thanks for your addition to the list, JR.
I agree about those people you mentioned – they’re suspect to me. How do they find all that time to devote to Twitter?
-Meg
September 20th, 2009 at 2:59 am
I would like to add
1. Tweets that don’t teach me.
2. Tweets that don’t inspire me.
3. Too may tweets. Even if they are good, the volume becomes spam.
4. Tweets that don’t make me think or smile.
5. Tweets that are inconsistent with my values.
September 20th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Thanks for commenting, Tim.
I love your additions to the expanding list, especially “too many tweets”. I don’t have time to read about phony schemes and I’m not interested in serial tweets leading me to your glitsy website that promises to change my life.
And thanks for following me on Twitter.
-Meg
September 22nd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Meg,
Good post. Twitter is very interesting, to say the least. My current strategy is very similar to yours. I was following a lot of people at one point, but it just got too hectic.
Only a small percentage of my tweets are not also sent to my other networks (I use HelloTxt to sync all my status updates)
-ASB
September 23rd, 2009 at 7:07 am
Thanks for adding your thoughts, Andrew.
Although I was first resistant to Twitter, I quickly found value in it, when I don’t allow it to eat up too much of my time. Twitter requires a strategy.
-Meg
October 11th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
[...] recently read an article by Meg Guiseppi entitled, “14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You on Twitter”, and I found that I shared many of her views on what constitutes a good network connection on [...]
October 29th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by megguiseppi: RT @megguiseppi 14 Reasons I Won’t Follow You On Twitter | Executive Resume Branding http://bit.ly/jwXLD...
November 22nd, 2009 at 8:16 am
I’m relatively new to twitter and therefore have probably made some of the mistakes pointed out. However, the more I use twitter and read informative articles like yours will hopefully make me a more interesting and responsible twitter user.
November 22nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Thanks for commenting, Ian. Glad I could help your Twitter strategy.
-Meg
December 17th, 2009 at 11:28 am
I just stumbled upon this article from your list of your favorite blog posts on personal branding. I think that another annoying tweet or DM that turns me off on a follow is the, “take this X quiz, I did.”
@HeidiSiefkas
December 17th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
Thanks for commenting, Heidi.
I get a lot of “take this X quiz, I did” DMs. The other one I love is “Saw this picture of you, ha ha ha!” I wonder where these links lead. I’m not willing to click and find out.
-Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 2:06 am
Great post! If your entire Twitter feed consists of links back to your blog, I won’t follow you. Twitter is about engagement and communication. Simply linking to your blog does not promote either.
February 1st, 2010 at 2:12 am
I block girls that want me to look at their nasty pictures. I unfollow people who use vulgar language or tell dirty jokes.
February 1st, 2010 at 2:26 am
Hi Meg – great list, thanks! On Twitter, I’ve seen lots of people suggest that we “should” follow back everyone who follows us, because that’s “polite”. I think that’s ridiculous! If I’m followed by spambots, wannabe porn-stars, idiots, time-wasters, pushy hard-sellers etc., I don’t feel at all obliged to follow them back – I don’t want their boring, useless, nonsensical, offensive messages clogging up my tweetstream.
To add to your list: I don’t follow people who tweet nothing but inspiring quotes by other people. I’d rather hear about THEIR lives, experiences, opinions…, not the second-hand ideas of others. Besides, I can find those inspiring quotes on lots of other websites.
@kayross
February 1st, 2010 at 2:27 am
Thanks, Meg!
Luckily, @Twitter_Tips RT’d your article. Props to them for finding it for me!
You’re post was spot-on. I’m relatively new to twitter and am finding several people that “follow” me quite odd. When I research them, they have nothing to do with my topics, bio, etc., but have chosen to follow me. Therefore, I’d like to add another one… I won’t follow you “just because” you’re following me. It appears some people might think if he/she begins to follow you, you might do the same. Well… I won’t!
I don’t think I would have found you without that retweet. Now, since I have… I may follow you for awhile. You have some interesting articles that could nudge me in a direction I want to go. Keep up the good work.
~ lisa ~
February 1st, 2010 at 2:56 am
I use Twitter to give update on Online MMORPG but that doesn’t mean I can’t tweet about anything else. Though I admit that there are some online gamer that use one way communication but there are other online gamers in Twitter who really can connect with other people. Yes sometimes we tweet a lot about those events or news or anything related to online game but hey, that’s not wrong right? I mean you can’t expect us to tweet something that we don’t know about. Its better being yourself than pretending to be smart. But back to topic, this article is very good since I did some of the action mentioned above.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:14 am
Perhaps someone has some great tweets but only has flashes of brilliance every 2 weeks, by those rules, you would miss out.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:24 am
I don’t agree that you should be ignored if you don’t have a picture. What if you don’t have good looks. Then what.
February 1st, 2010 at 4:04 am
I’m pretty ruthless at not just unfollowing people who attach themselves to me, but if I really disagree with what they’re selling or saying I’ll block them as well.
I’ll add to your list – if you can’t type anything without text-speech or teen-speak. English works well, even within 140 characters, text-speech or teen-speak used in excess just results in gibberish.
Oh..and for me….and I know it sounds snobbish and ageist…I’m the wrong side of 45. I’m rarely going to follow anyone on teh young side of 20 because although you’re probably very nice people I’ll probably share little in common! :-)
February 1st, 2010 at 6:53 am
Thank you for your list of ‘will nots’, i do apply them. I don’t tweet very often myself unless i come across something of beneficial interest. I have yet to get to the social aspect of what Twitter is all about. Also, i am still optimising my webpage before i get it out on the net and learning as i go from the ground up. Very difficult with limited cash. Again, thank you, i found your list valuable:)
February 1st, 2010 at 10:15 am
Thanks, Amanda. I’m right with you on your “won’t-follow” rule.
-Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:16 am
Thanks, Steve. I don’t go for unsavory tweets or smutty pix either.
-Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:21 am
Thanks for chiming in, Kay.
Aside from the annoyance factor in following disreputable people, having them show up as your followers may diminish or tarnish your brand reputation. I won’t follow someone who follows obviously “bad” people.
I’m also not attracted to tweeters who constantly post inspirational quotes or messages.
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:24 am
Lisa, thanks very much for commenting and for your kind words. I’m glad you found me, too, and I hope you’ll check out my new blog/website Executive Career Brand — http://www.executivecareerbrand.com — where I’m more active these days.
I agree with you about not following people “just because” they follow you. I won’t do it either. I take a close look at everyone who follows me before hitting the “follow” button for them.
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:27 am
Thanks, Adrence.
Of course you should be tweeting about online gaming if that’s your gig and the people in that sphere are the ones you want to attract. I sometimes follow people out of my realm — personal branding and executive job search — if they appear genuine and tweet well.
-Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:31 am
Hi Don,
Thanks for commenting. Whether or not someone is good-looking is no reason not to include a photo, in my opinion. A photo, first and foremost, helps me determine that this is a real person. No matter what you look like, your photo can (and should) convey your professionalism and something of what kind of person you are.
-Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:35 am
Thanks for weighing in, Joe.
I’ve blocked quite a few as well, but haven’t unfollowed anyone yet, though I’ve considered it. I’m on the other side of 45 like you, but come across many, many “youngsters” tweeting about personal branding, social media, job search, and other topics of interest to me whom I find well worth following. But they’re never the ones using text-speech or teen-speak. I don’t have the time or inclination to muddle through their cryptic messaging.
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 10:38 am
Heeni, thanks for commenting. I’m glad my post was helpful.
One of the great things about building your online identity and e-brand is that most of it is free. Keep at it. It takes time to gain traction and become sticky to the people you want to attract.
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 2:18 pm
the only one i disagree with is the one about politics. i try to follow people with a variety of political and religious beliefs. i think it keeps me from being too narrow in my perspective. however, i will say that an abundance of profanity will cause me to un-follow.
February 1st, 2010 at 2:57 pm
My biggest tweet hate is users who tweet nothing but stuff from apps, all the time. I’ve just taken this quiz! Look at this video! I’m using (insert annoying viral thing), please do so too!
February 1st, 2010 at 3:06 pm
We haven’t put it in writing like you did, but your blog post should be added to some sort of rules database or something. Totally true.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:25 pm
I found this article via a Tweet by @Flipbooks. I’m relatively new to Twitter (less than a month) and I find yours and everyone’s comments interesting. I’ve already unfollowed those who don’t tweet anything of value or who just comment to a string of people and/or hash tags in hopes of trending on Twitter.
Great article, Meg. I also read your Never on Sundays article. I doubt that I could do that as Sunday is usually my catch up day.
February 1st, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Thanks for commenting, Lauree.
Now that I re-read this post from about 5 months ago, I don’t know if I agree with the one about politics anymore either. I like to remain flexible, but I rarely tweet about things political, unless they are very near and dear to my heart.
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Thanks, Holly.
I’m right with you on that point. I won’t follow links to that stuff, because I don’t have time to waste on it, and sometimes they lead you to spammy sites.
-Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Thanks for commenting here, CodeMyConcept, and for RTing the post. I appreciate the support!
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Hi Carole,
Thanks for commenting. I’m glad everyone who’s chimed in has been helpful. Keep at it with Twitter. You’ll get your sea legs quickly. Thanks for reading my Never On Sundays post – http://executivecareerbrand.com/social-media-never-on-sunday/ – As I hit the “publish” button, I thought it all may be wishful thinking. Sometimes I can’t help but play catch-up on Sundays, too. But I figure if I can get in a few Sundays here and there without social media, I’ll consider myself successful.
Best,
Meg
February 1st, 2010 at 4:03 pm
I love these points and on that note, I WILL be following you! Oh and the biggest turn off for me is people who use large amounts of slang in their tweets!
February 1st, 2010 at 5:00 pm
Thanks for commenting, Sylva, and for following me on Twitter.
Too much slang turns me off, too. Happy tweeting!
-Meg
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:19 am
[...] on February 2, 2010 · 0 comments With a sudden flurry of tweets and blog comments for my original post of the same name over at my Executive Resume Branding blog, I decided to take a second look at my “won’t follow” criteria four months [...]
February 2nd, 2010 at 9:17 pm
Don’t judge a book by it’s cover. Photos are important. If I can’t see you, why should I wish to connect with you?
Tim
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:56 am
Hi Tim,
You’re so right! Photos can sell you and attract people to you.
Thanks for commenting,
Meg
February 8th, 2010 at 11:00 am
[...] This post was Twitted by srbnst [...]