Top 10 Terrible Tweets

Twitter is an excellent tool if used responsibly. I am fairly new to the Twittersphere, but already I am finding some activities very annoying. Here is my Top 10 Terrible Tweets on Twitter.

Spoof Twitter profile

10. I am not going to start with Tweets but Profiles. How many times do you read; “I am an expert at SEO, Web2.0, blah, blah, blah. My site is rated No1 on blah , blah , blah”?

Come on who are you trying to kid? If you were that good, you would not be posting tweets with links to your site. If you are that good, then go and spend time with your family and let someone else Tweet for your company!

9.”I am listening to “Your song” on Blah.FM”.

To be honest I don’t care. All you are doing is Tweeting a plug for the online radio station. Now if you were to Tweet  “Listening to: “I fought the Law, by the Clash”; I am reliving that failed bank raid, I carried out”. Then it might well catch my attention!

8. “Good morning, Thank you and welcome to all my new followers who joined over night”.

I really don’t like this. It comes across only a little better than the auto DM’s sent to new followers. This is just the thing that those operating pyramid follow schemes post everyday.

7. “RT @twitrant New web page: How Twitter can change the world. http;//www.twitrant.com/change_the_world.htm”

ReTweeting masses of Tweets to inflate your number of updates. Unless your followers are likely to be interested in a Tweet, don’t do it. If you can,  say why you liked that the Tweet you are ReTweeting.

6. “ @twitrant New web page: How Twitter can change the world. http;//www.twitrant.com/change_the_world.htm Please Retweet this”.

Asking followers for ReTweets, MrTweets, followfridays, Stumbles. etc. I’m sure I don’t need to explain this. If the Tweets are good, then they will get Re Tweeted and if we think Tweeple or their web sites are worthy of recommendations, we will give them. Its a sure sign of a commercial outfit, when they ask for this.

5. “New web page: How Twitter can change the world. http;//www.twitrant.com/change_the_world.htm”

Twitter streams that are nothing more than an RSS feed of their owners web site. So you joined Twitter, but can’t actually be bothered to Tweet about anything, so instead you add a widget to your site to automatically Tweet your web pages. Sorry, you will have to try harder.

4. “Pandemic of copied news headlines”

Looking up the news sites and posting the latest news headline. There are a few Tweeple that do this every single day. They just get a news headline, make a  TinyURL , then Tweet it. No thinking required.
My browser already has a BBC News Headlines button so I don’t need your Tweeted copy.  Now if you were to give your reaction or feelings to that news maybe I would be interested.

3. “Look how wonderful I am, I have 2000 followers”.

Don’t you realise that all you need to do to get followers is to find out those who will most likely follow you back and follow them? Of course its also bad form to brag.

2. “A quotation on Twitter only needs Control C and Control V – John Williams 2009″.

Excessive use of quotations annoys me and I believe Twitter, as they have suspended accounts for excessive use. Looking up quotations is real easy on the Internet. Unless your quotation describes how you feel at a particular moment or reinforces a point, then don’t Tweet them. A long list of your favourite quotations just wastes bandwidth. Furthermore, as internet servers have quite substantial carbon footprints, they are hastening climate chaos.

1. “Click on the link and you’ll get thousands of followers”.

There are lots of pyramid follow schemes available for Twitter. As I said before all you need to do to get followers is to follow people, who will follow you back. Then you could have thousands are even hundreds of thousands following you. However you could also be following thousands of Tweeple as well. What good is that?

That’s my rant over. Actually, Twitter can be very useful and will only improve as stream filtering produces more relevant Tweets to your likes. Twibes seems like a good start in this direction, with Tweets grouped by like minded people and including up to three keywords. I am hopeful that Twitter will be an even better experience in the future. Which Tweets annoy you on Twitter? Where do you see the future of Twitter?