Twitter is like a cocktail party. There are always annoying guests who just seem to get in the way of everyone else’s good time. And just as those guests don’t seem to know they’re annoying half the time, some tweeters seem blissfully unaware of the trail of irritated followers they’re leaving behind them.

If you’re doing any (or all!) of these five things, you’re the person everyone wants chucked out.

The hard sell

You know what it’s like – you start talking to someone and all they yabber on about is what they do and their business. Every time they meet someone they hand them their card. Sometimes you just want to talk about puppies and bedspreads you know? It’s fine to sell yourself, but save it for when it’s relevant, don’t ram it down people’s throats.

Writing too much…

Part of the beauty of Twitter is the character limit. Yes, sometimes it’s infuriating trying to encapsulate your unadulterated nuggets of wisdom into 140 characters, but there’s a certain discipline of thought and language that goes into that. A tweet is like a haiku, any more or any less and the fragile syntactical harmony collapses.

If you can’t fit it in one tweet, write it somewhere else. Like Facebook.

Retweeting compliments

Akin to the hard sell. ‘The Queen said she absolutely loved the cushions I sold her’. No one cares. OK, maybe people care the first time. And it is nice to tell people about nice things that other people have said about you.

But constantly? That’s starting to look like narcissism. And Narcissus fell into a lake.

Writing all in caps

STOP SHOUTING IT MAKES ME UNCOMFORTABLE.

Nothing but links

This particular Twitter sin comes in two flavours:

• Only ever posting tweets which contain links. Have a conversation once in a while.

• Posting links without any explanation. What are you, a spammer?

The first one is like walking around with a newspaper and only ever talking to people to point out really great stories in it.

Most people like a good story, but they’re also suspicious of someone who can only talk in someone else’s words.

The second is like doing the same thing but in mime. Just pointing and expecting other people to look. Would you look without being told why? No – you might see something horrible.

Do you have anything else to add to the list? Please leave your comments below.

Image Credit: gumuz

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 28th, 2011 at 10:01 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.