As you go through your Twitter journey you will no doubt run across hundreds, thousands, maybe even millions of people. Each one has their own way of doing things on Twitter, some better than others. If your goal is to be successful with Twitter, then you should avoid the following behaviors at all costs.
The Self Promoter
You can recognize this person by a very noticeable pattern in their tweets: all the links point to them. Sometimes they take this a step further and will post a normal update, such as what restaurant they’re currently dining in, and leave an out of place link to their website at the tail of that tweet.
Seriously, what’s going on with that? Marketing through narcissism has never produced good results, so why continue this pattern on Twitter? Congratulations Self Promoter, you really put the “me” in “social media”.
The Constant Retweeter
You’ve probably seen this person in the wild before. This person never has anything of their own to say, they just retweet what others say. Constantly. The lack of originality in these types is astounding.
The Quoter
On the same level as The Constant Retweeter, The Quoter never has anything of their own to say as well. They just litter their Twitter stream with statements made by people who aren’t on Twitter. It should be noted that there is a tolerance level for how many times a person can quote Mark Twain in a single day; anything over once and you’ve gone over your limit.
The API Guy
This person is a little harder to identify. If you look closely at updates in your timeline, you will see the where other people’s tweets originated. Most often you’ll see that they came from the web, Tweetdeck, Gwibber, etc. But for people that just can’t be bothered to do some actual interaction with other people, you’ll see that their tweets have an origination of “API”. That means the tweets have been stored and scheduled by some form of software and released in a timed fashion. This is the equivalent of a bot.
The Cash Cow
Similar to The Self Promoter, The Cash Cow tweeter is out to get theirs. They think of their followers as a commodity and something that should be monetized. That is why you see so many of their daily updates with #ad or #spon in them. It doesn’t appear that anyone ever told them that their twitter stream is very much like a mailbox stuffed with junk mail.
The Linkjacker
The Linkjacker is an offshoot of The Self Promoter. Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with promoting your own site occasionally, but the Linkjacker kicks this up a notch. Instead of pushing out a link to their site, they provide a link to the Digg or Stumbleupon submission of their site. This is done in hopes that you will help them market their site to even more people.
The Snob
These are the people who choose to use social media without being social. They post updates for everyone to see but you won’t see them ever reply to anyone. Ok, once in a blue moon a Snob may reply to someone, but instances like this are rare. The Snobs are usually employed as actors or singers.
So that’s the list of the 7 habits of highly annoying Twitter users. How would your list have compared?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
If two of those behaviors can be used to describe yourself, do they cancel each other out? Nice post.
If it turns out that that is true, that would be very nice indeed! I have wandered over the line before into two of these arenas before, and I would be happy to hear that the mixing of two would be like matter meeting anti-matter.
Candid observations — and true —lots of us (Twitter addicts) can be guilty of these behaviours.
I wonder then, what are the 7 habits of highly engaging Twitter users? —or the path to Twitter brilliance.
I hate to say this but most of the peeps who fit these categories are…men. See, my theory is that U.S. women are generally better at chit-chat and building relationships; therefore, we transfer these skills more adeptly to the social networking world than men do. Although I follow guys who know how to tweet appropriately and in the spirit of the medium, there are so many blowhards out there who can do nothing but toot their own horn all.day.long. Chris Voss is a perfect example. Yeah, he’s got 67K followers but all he tweets about is himself–all the time! And then has the gall to want to put a stop to the Follow Friday “noise” so we can have real “conversations.” Coming from a guy who wouldn’t know how to dialogue with a talking wombat, I found his lament to be pretty laughable. When I called him on it, he blocked me.
No offense guys, but you could really stand to take note of how some of the more popular social networking WOMEN tweet if you don’t want to wind up getting listed in any of the aforementioned categories. just sayin’