In a sense, social media is like one big popularity contest. The in crowd has loads of Twitter followers, tons of Facebook friends. They get ‘liked’ and ‘shared’ and LinkedIn like they were born to do it.
Then you have the unlucky crew who finds themselves unfriended. Unfollowed! Even blocked.
Let’s seat you in at the right “lunch table” shall we? We’ll start with Twitter. Here are some surefire ways to keep you from being unfollowed.
- Don’t come off crazy! So that annoying guy at Starbucks budged in line. Unless you do it in a witty, lighthearted way – don’t tweet your ‘cafe rage’. It’s not interesting or valuable to anyone and it could paint you as a negative nutcase.
- Don’t offend. There’s nothing followable about racism, sexism or off-color tweets. Anything you wouldn’t say in front of a live customer should never be tweeted. Heck – you shouldn’t be saying that stuff in the first place!
- Don’t be Casper. You have to keep up your end of the conversation. If you tweet once a month, don’t be surprised if no one cares about your opinions (or your coupon codes.) Keep it frequent.
- Don’t be “OverFrequent”, Either: Once a month is too little but once every 10 minutes for 6 hours straight is obnoxious. Don’t punish your followers by dominating up their screens with tons of tweets. Let someone else get a tweet in edgewise.
- Don’t Overshare: I don’t care who you are, I don’t want to know about your partying, your personal hygiene or your bathroom breaks. And you know what….your followers agree with me.
- Don’t Go Link Nuts: Posting links is encouraged. Just make sure you don’t dump a URL as a tweet with no explanation. It comes off spammy, even if the link is a nice photo of your nice doggie. Explain what your followers will see when they click that link!
- Don’t Get Too Controversial: Getting overzealous about a certain political party or sports team or celebrity will lose your followers who don’t care for them. Don’t be boring, certainly, but try not to taunt your followers.
- Don’t be a Robot: The point of Twitter is to let people get to know you, personally. Automating everything (in an obvious way) is a big fat turn-off to a lot of people. No one wants to follow software.
What makes you unfollow someone? Tell us your best unfollow story by posting a comment below!
thanks dude, you are doing a big help for people…
Really great points-I also set up free account with .socialoomph -what I like with them is when people join me I can organize many different messages to every new follower- the other thing I never do is have any links on the thank you for joining me-looks clean and not spammy-really shows I am happy they joined my Twitter account and show interest to their tweets not driving them to some affiliate page- Thanks again Don
Thanks for the tips. I agree it is super annoying when an affiliate just autoposts the same exact tweet with “Check this out …link” or some headline and then the affiliate link and it shows up like 12 times in a row every hour on the hour…like we don’t know what you’re doing. Then, I never see any “real” posts from that follower. After a week of that they’ll get the unfollow/block from me.
Hi Don, I specially like the first way “Don’t come off Crazy”. If tweeters would follow these simple ways, I think you would not get this message “twitter is over capacity”
Thanks for sharing.
Norma Serrano
Yep – crazy isn’t good, in just about anything!
Thanks for your comment.
Don
Twitter’s servers reaching their capacity limit isn’t related to people lacking manners or strategy on Twitter. Turns out, it’s only related to popularity of the service.