How to Lose Followers on Twitter
If you use Twitter, you may have read many articles about how important it is to get followers. In fact, you may be getting tweets from people bragging about how they got hundreds or thousands of followers and how they can help you do the same. For some, it’s always about the competition. But that’s a different topic.
Here are the 10 quickest ways to LOSE followers on Twitter:
- Post 50 tweets a day. Even if they are interesting, you’re not the only person I follow, and your firehose approach to tweeting is drowning out the rest. I have to unfollow you just so I can see what everyone else is saying.
- Tweet about mundane daily activities we all do: eating, sleeping, watching TV, shopping, doing laundry, etc. Sorry, boring and pointless!
- Retweet endlessly. I love a good retweet now and then, but if the majority of your tweets are retweeting other people, stop. Also, on a related note, if you’re going to retweet, be careful and put your own comments BEFORE the person you’re quoting. Otherwise you’re changing what they said. How do readers know which part of the RT was from the original poster and which part was your opinion?
- Switch personalities. If I signed up to follow you because of your professional opinions, don’t start telling me about the bad sushi you had last night. While varying your content to some extent can keep things interesting, your voice needs to be consistent.
- Try to sell me something. Use a light hand on any sales pushes. A steady stream of sales-centric tweets isn’t likely to win you many followers.
- Needlessly use profanity. Unless you’re a celebrity with a bad boy or bad girl reputation you’re trying to enhance, don’t use vulgar language you wouldn’t use in public.
- Never tweet. Something you said once prompted me to follow you. If I think that’s all you’ve got, I’m history.
- Get the facts wrong. If it’s on purpose, you’re lying to me. If it’s a mistake, you’re too lazy to research before you tweet. Either way, I’m gone.
- Focus on the negative. If everything you tweet about is a downer… I’m gone.
- Abbreviate to the point of illegibility. If your tweets require an urban dictionary to decipher, or they’re full of pointless #hashtags, misspellings, or “custom” abbreviations, I’m not going to care anymore.
While there are certainly more than 10 ways to lose followers, hopefully these examples will make the point. Here’s help for gaining followers on Twitter.