As a daily Twitter user, I have come across a few things that bug me. I am sure others have things that bug them too (and I’m sure some of my followers have things they don’t like about me). Here are the main things that bug me on Twitter. I would love to see your pet peeves in the comments section.
1) Continual Sales Posts: There are a few people that I follow on Twitter that some days I wonder why. They really don’t seem to bring anything to the table as far as information; it is basically one ad for their company after another. On top of it some of them seem to also have a huge ego with posts like “we are the best…” To me Twitter is a community where people can find like minded folks and connect. Yes it can and should be used to promote your products and services, but it also should be used to share ideas, discuss hot topics and just to plain get to know someone. Be engaging, and be helpful first!
2) Non-Re-tweetable Posts: OK, So re-tweetable might not be a word, but one thing is for sure, re-tweeting (RT) is a large part of the Twitter world. To re-tweet is to take someone’s post and resend it to all of your followers. It normally starts with RT @{User Name of Person who posted original item}. This is normally used for reposting someone’s announcement or information that you found useful that you think your followers also might want to know about. I typically re-tweet post about coupon codes or sales etc. It is the nice thing to do and it also allows you to be the connector between people that might not necessarily be connected already. The problem occurs when someone posts something that is too long to re-tweet. When you post something that you want someone to RT (re-tweet), remember that you must be far enough under the 140 character limit to then include RT_@{your user name}. So for example if I post a coupon code for a sale, I would make sure that my post is no longer than 124 characters long because RT @coastalaaron is 16 characters long. With most of the Twitter programs that I use re-tweeting is very easy. Just a touch of a button, but if your post is too long, then I have to manually edit it. I have started to just pass on those, especially if it is just a sales/advertisement post.
3) Copy Cat User Names: In all of the people that I am now following (367 as of the writing of this blog) I have run across some that either just repost the same thing as another user name or don’t actually share any information other than re-tweets of the parent user name. I wake up in morning to a ton of Tweets and duplicate posts just annoy me.
4) #WW #TT #FF #MM Re-Tweeters: These are the Tweeps (People on Twitter) that RT those annoying Follow Friday, Writer Wednesday and whatever else over and over. I think the Follow Friday is a good idea if you are going to share useful people to follow and you use it sparingly. If you just Re-tweet a ton of them on every day of the week, you might get a lot of followers, but do you really get any people who interact with positive messages and provide you with useful information on Twitter?
Who follows me on Twitter? What do I do that annoys you? What are some things that annoy you about your Twitter experience? What is your Twitter Handle?
As regards your ‘non retweetable posts’ peeve, I’m afraid the answer is it’s you who is ‘ur doin it rong’ – the kind of retweet you’re describing yourself as doing should only be done if you actually want to edit the content of the post before retweeting (eg to add a comment); if all you’re doing is passing the message on verbatim, then what you should be doing is the so-called new-style retweet, which most clients do easily enough. The new-style retweet is preferred because it means that people who follow you who also follow who you’re retweeting will only get the message once, in its original form – there’s little more annoying than when one sees many people all old-style retweeting the same message, cluttering up one’s own Twitter streams with duplicate retweets.