It’s great to have a lot of followers on Twitter because it means other people are interested in what you’re thinking or doing. At the same time, it’s also important to recognize it’s also pretty easy to get unfollowed, particularly if you do some of the following:
1. Broadcast your location. Why anyone really needs to tell other people where they’re located is puzzling but is it necessary to tell the entire world you’re at Joe’s Bar at 421 Main St. in Tuscon?
2. Talk about your cat, the hangover you’re suffering from, the weather or what kind of day you’re having or going to have.
3. Comment on something without providing a link to provide context.
4. Suffer from tweet-a-rhia in which you feel the need to tweet dozens of times a day. No one, including your closest friends, is interested in hearing that much about your life. And if you do feel the need to consume that much digital real estate, write a blog post to cover all the bases.
5. Send out of a flurry of tweets back-to-back-back, which suggests you’ve automated your tweets to appear at a certain time as opposed to either doing them manually or spacing them out throughout the day.
6. Generate automated tweets rather than hand-crafting them. Twitter is about authenticity, not automation.
7. Use obscenities or make sexist/racist tweets.
8. Over using Twitter as a way to broadcast that a new blog post has been published. I can handle the spotlight being put on a few good ones but some large blogs user Twitter for every single post – good, bad or indifferent.
3 Comments
Feels like you're instructing people to keep their tweet to business topics only. You have every right to unfollow people for any of the reasons listed above, but some folks are on Twitter for the sole purpose of reading that minutia and hearing about their friend's cat. Not everyone on Twitter is a social media marketer or wants to read Mashable articles all day.
I totally agree that automated tweets are insufferable and deserve an instant unfollow.
I like Twitter as a resource/information tool, which gives me a bias against tweets that are too personal. Many Twitter users have a split personality but I tend to like people who stay with talking about business.
Thanks for the comment – much appreciated!
Mark
Hey, I found another reason to lose your followers! Well, I guess it's better if I say them spammers rather than followers! I noticed that hundreds of MLM guys first follow you and as many people do, you follow these MLM guys back. Then after a few days these MLM guys unfollow you. It is their tactic to show how successful they are since they have more number of followers than the the number of people they follow!!