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A great example of how not to use Twitter

Submitted by on February 26, 2011 – 10:00 am4 Comments

Before I go off on my little weekend rant I should point out that like many things on this site…. this is just my opinion on how Twitter shouldn’t be used. There are those of you (hopefully) that’ll agree with me and of course there are those who won’t but I doubt they’ll be the ones reading this as they see social media and blogs like this as something that can be automated and not interacted with.

The term social media can also be used in regards to this site as it does rely on your interaction…… but we’re not looking at that today….. today is all about Twitter.

Call me a Twitter snob but I’m I’m quite happy with my 1700 or so followers. I follow most of them back (there’s no auto following going on in this house) and it’s generally photographers who I follow (and list).

About a year of so ago I had roughly the same amount of followers but that was due to me using automated re-following software. As a result my Twitter stream was of absolute no interest or relevance to me at all.

These robots that were following me had no interest in what I was sharing and certainly wouldn’t re-tweet or interact with me.

So I got rid of the automation and unfollowed hundreds of followers……. and it has taken a few months to get back that same following in terms of numbers.

The difference is it’s a quality following and a relevant one.

Take the social out of social media and all you have is noise.

I still of course get lots of robots follow me…………until I don’t follow the back and their un-follow no-followers software kicks in.

I had such a robot follow me just the other day and I thought it was a great example of how to use Twitter is probably the least social way possible.

The person in question was in fact a very good photographer and author on lighting……. just my cap of tea……until I looked at his Twitter feed….. disappointing…. here’s why:

  • 200+ tweets and the links all go to the same page (about 10 a day).
  • Of the 200+ tweets there are in fact only about 3 or 4 different messages that have been retweeted over and over and over again.
  • No interaction with followers whatsoever… no @mentions no RT’s ……nothing!
  • In fact nothing is tweeted other than this one link over and over and over again!

Strangely the only other linked shared on the Twitter profile is to the photographers blog and not the book!

Anyway to get the most out of Twitter do exactly the opposite of this and you’ll find it a far more worthwhile experience!

  • Tim Hoy

    I am sure I also set a great example of how not to use twitter (probably). I signed up so I could respond to tweets about the 2010 project http://www.the2010project.com but then didn’t use it for 10 months and so far I think I’ve logged on to Twitter about 3 – 6 times since.

    I know people who are on there half of their waking hours keeping up with mates and work contacts and some business users keep up to date with who’s asking what to make sure they don’t lose a sales opportunity, but like Facebook, many of these social networking sites routinely degenerate into playground-like drivel that consumes time I don’t have for such trivial pursuits. I do not need or want to know what you have for breakfast, nor do I wish to participate in a survey based on what is my most and least used household appliance etc.

    I am also one of those people who is a slow learner with new technology, so although I have the potential for email and web access on my mobile, I’ve never set it up. I’ve also signed up to LinkedIn on the basis that it was recommended to me by someone I trusted to be sensible (which she is). That too has an increasing number of people wanting to be a contact with me who I’ve never met have little in common with and who appear to be desperately increasing the number of contacts they have to show how popular they are.

    Their various forums – like all forums – also contain an increasingly high volume of such trite nonsense that I fear I will start avoiding that too.

  • Anonymous

    It’s always the case that if you can manage to avoid the nonsense you can usually discover what is actually useful to you on these networks.

    Alas this does require time and occasional effort so the benefits don’t always outweigh the costs.

  • http://twitter.com/RicherSeaPhoto Andy Haynes

    Great article, and such a great example of someone totally missing the point! As you say if you take the social out of social network whatever is left is pretty worthless. Personally I’ve not been using twitter very long and don’t even have 100 followers, but they are real people that I actually interact with. To be honest, I tend to unfollow people who’s streams bore me pretty fast.

  • Andrew Miller

    totally agree. If your gonna have s/w that re-tweets make sure you have a large number of different tweets to re-tweet!