Jenise Fryatt Bio

While there really aren't any hard and fast rules on Twitter, there are a few things that will incur the ire of many fellow Tweeters. Doing them may get you ignored, unfollowed, blocked or draw negative comments. Example:









So if you're looking to lose a few people, read on!!

1. Nonstop Self Promotion.

"Check out my latest blogpost!" "Like us on Facebook!" "Come to our super-awesome event!!" Say it loud and proud and don't stop to check if anyone cares or is even listening. This is the number-one way to get rid of people.

Yes, you can and should put out a few tweets that promote your brand or what you are doing. But they shouldn't be common. Some say your should tweet 12 non-self-promotional tweets for every self-promotional tweet. I feel that as long as most of what you are promoting adds value and doesn't cost anything (i.e. your own blog posts) if you keep your self-promotional tweets to under 20% of the content you are posting, you aren't likely to irritate people.

2. Insulting Tweets

Not long after I joined Twitter, I retweeted a blog post that was a little controversial. This really got one of my followers going. He responded with a very insulting tweet that was aimed at the blogger but looked like it was aimed at me. In any case, I unfollowed him. Some of my friends saw the tweet and also unfollowed or blocked him.  Basically, who needs that?

3. No Interaction

Whether you're posting mundane boring tweets, quotes or links to blog articles, if I see nothing but a monologue on your Twitter timeline, it is VERY unlikely that I will follow you. Why? I'm not sure if you are really even on Twitter. For all I know, you could be scheduling all of your tweets 20 minutes a day and never even looking at what others are posting. I want to follow people who are likely to read what I post and engage with me, as well as post tweets that are interesting to me.

4. Oblivious Community Tweets

If you are going to use a hashtag that denotes a community on Twitter, it is wise to follow that hashtag and get to know the community. Not doing so could result in embarrassing tweets that expose you as an outsider and could make you look very bad. 

People can be very protective of their hashtag communities. So be respectful.  Watch the hashtag timeline. Click on links. Introduce yourself by joining chats or commenting on blogs. As you do so, the community will get to know and trust you as one of its members.

5. Flooding the Stream with Back to Back Tweets

OK, you only have a few minutes a day to tweet so you post all your daily tweets at one time, back to back. Bad. But even worse, you post all your daily tweets back to back on a community hashtag. Talk about an excellent way to alienate people!

Remember, people get on Twitter to see what's going on and share with lots of other people. They aren't there to see the "Jenise's Tweets Show."  

If you are serious about your social media marketing strategy, you should be posting several times per day, NOT all at once. For the sake of time and convenience you can use applications like HootSuite, TweetDeck or Buffer to schedule your tweets. I highly recommend this.

The good news is that if you do any or all of the previous things on Twitter, changing your behavior will make a big difference.  I've found the community to be filled with forgiving people with short memories. (So short, in fact, that I doubt that many of them will remember that I used to do a few of these things myself.)

Twitter is an excellent classroom if you are paying attention. Spending a little time everyday lurking on Twitter and clicking on interesting links will teach you more about social media marketing in general than almost anything else can.