Twitter comes with its own set of unwritten rules, etiquette and nuances.  Sometimes, it is not so obvious what you can and cannot do, esp. since so many behaviors and “rules” on Twitter seem to have evolved naturally by users and aren’t neatly packaged on their Help section.

No matter what you do, you will lose followers along the way. However, there are some common behaviors you can avoid that can help limit that drop-off list.  Here is a basic list of 15 Twitter scenarios to avoid:

• You use Twitter automation software retweeting and reposting the same tweets and links every hour on the hour
• Too many self-complementary announcements
• Your bio has misspellings, poor grammar or bad language or is hard to understand
• You send spammy direct messages (not personalized) to your new followers with a link
• Your tweets are disproportionately selling or promoting a product or service
• Your Twitter username and bio tout yourself as a self-made guru, expert, maven or any other  narcissistic term
• You produce absolutely no original content and your Twitter account has been on autopilot since 2009
• You tweet too much, crowding everyone’s timeline and eating up the “acceptable”
  amount of “real estate” – we call this ‘tweel estate’
• Your tweets look good but the content you link to is very poorly written or unrelated to the user’s interest
• Your Twitter account has the same content has your Facebook fan page and I already follow your fan page so I unfollow to avoid duplicate content
• You are following 10,000 people and 5 people are following you; you are following 30,000 people, 25,0000 are following you and you don’t tweet
• Your Twitter username has too many odd characters in it in order to get in some keywords
• An overuse of shortlinks that look spammy
• You tweet too little for the user’s preferences
• You have no picture on your profile or an inappropriate photo that your audience can not identify with

Also, many people will unfollow you if they follow you and you do not follow them back. While it is common courtesy to follow someone back, we tend not to worry about tweeps whose motive is based on building their numbers and not engaging with your content.

We all have different tastes, pet peeves and preferences, so adapt this list to your liking if you are interested and hopefully it will help you avoid Twitter unfollows…

Related post: Is Facebook A Waste Of Time?

If you have a question or comment, please feel free to get in touch with our marketing consultants.