I cannot imagine what life must be like for kids these days. If I think of the bullying that went on in my school days without Facebook and Twitter, I don't even want to imagine what it must be like now. But unfortunately, some people never grow up so the bullying continues into adulthood. I saw something like that happen to one of my followers yesterday and it got her to the point where she changed her profile picture to something that isn't her face and removed her full name from her profile.
Twitter is a great way to connect with people, but we need to always remember just that: You're not talking to an avatar. You're talking to a person.
Bullying is just one reason to unfollow and block someone. Below are my top 3 reasons to block someone and my top 10 reasons to unfollow/not follow someone.
Top 3 reasons to block someone:
- You are bullying someone (surprise, surprise). It doesn't matter who. If you bully someone, you're not a nice person and I want nothing to do with you.
- You are threatening someone in any shape or form. I've seen a lot of threats thrown out there during the OWS high season. If you threaten people with things like 'we will find you', you're going to get blocked. And reported.
- You send me and a bunch of other random people a link to a 'giveaway' (and expect me to be stupid enough to click on it)
Top 10 reasons to unfollow/not follow someone:
- You have the word 'bitch' or a derivate of the word in your handle.
- You use profanity ALL the time. I am no angel when it comes to that, but I know how and when to express myself without using profanity. If you can't, you need to go back to school. Or get your mouth washed with soap.
- You tweet every single Foursquare, GetGlue, etc. check in. It's ok to tweet it when you have something to say about the place (like 'best brunch in town') but if I wanted to know where you are at all times, I would request to be friends with you on Foursquare.
- You are negative. All you do is whine and bitch about bad service, talk trash about other people, etc. Get over yourself.
- You tweet about your sex life. Really? If you have to tweet about it to get satisfaction, it's not that great.
- You tweet about what you're eating or cooking. Again, it's fine if it's 'this is the best XYZ I have ever had and here is where you can find it'. But who cares that you are cooking something with someone? No one.
- You constantly retweet others but don't produce any original content.
- You haven't tweeted in a month.
- You tweet about things I don't care about.
- Your bio or tweets state that you are a social media guru/ninja/expert. Maybe I'll follow you if you have 10K+ followers to substantiate a claim like that.
What did I miss? What are you twitter pet peeves that make you hit the unfollow/block button? Share your thoughts by commenting below.
Good stuff. :) I had to double check and see if you were still following me, considering I post "food" pics and stuff on occasion ;) haha.
ReplyDeleteI would never unfollow you! Food pics are fun, it's the "I am making chili with my boyfriend" tweets that are annoying. I guess it applies to more than food too. "I am watching XYZ show" is just as bad if there is no qualifier added like "it's the best show ever because". The latter may entice me to check out the show (or restaurant/recipe) myself. But just stating you're doing something... I am probably guilty of that myself sometimes, but with some people that is the majority of what they do on Twitter.
DeleteMy main reasons for unfollowing:
ReplyDelete- Abusing automation
- Using obviously scripted tweets (IE: I see the same tweet day after day, you re-tweet the SAME blog post over and over again)
- Blatant, overt, and repeated self promotion, retweeting every positive comment directed at you or RT of one of your posts
- on Follow Friday you tweet a huge list of @ names without actually explaining why I should followed them, followed shortly by you RT'ng every #FF mention of you... I get it.. I am already following you
- Conversation rarely starts from you. This just means you obviously don't read my tweets, the only time we interact is when I comment or reply to you, twitter isn't a two way conversation for you its just a "social telephone" that you answer when someone calls YOU
Thats just off the top of my head... and it was difficult to not throw people under the bus with each example ... but that will have to do for now :)
I am glad you were able to comment now. I am not sure why you weren't able before. I totally agree with most of your points. I think right now I am probably a little guilty of number 3 because I am posting about the fundraiser and the event tonight like crazy. I promise I will stop after this so don't unfollow me! :)
DeleteThe #FF one isn't necessarily a reason for me to unfollow someone, but I barely ever follow anyone that is in a list like that. I like the approach of choosing 2-3 people each Friday and give them each a separate #FF tweet with a reason why (what you called out too).
Thanks for your comment. You added good points to add to the list!