The 5 Fastest Ways To Get "Unfollowed" and Generally Ignored on Twitter

...at least by me.

There are hundreds of posts written about Twitter etiquette and all of the myriad ins and outs of being followed by an ever expanding circle of, well, followers. People honestly, we're not in high school anymore and the number of people following you truly does not reflect your popularity so it's probably not a good idea to measure your self image by the number in the followers column. Which brings me to the first of five surefire ways to get me to unfollow you.

Follow up:

1. Popularity Groupies - If you want to be unfollowed by me, start sending Tweets about how you only need "x" number more people to follow you to reach some arbitrary golden number of "friends". Ah, I don't care how many followers you have...any more than I care how many are following me. Unless you have something interesting to say or remotely relevant to the topics that I care about I'm not following you.

2. Real Estate Hogs - Logging onto my Twitter page and seeing 18 of 20 visible tweets are from one individual causes my eyes to glaze over and I blindly group for...you guessed it...the unfollow button. I'm sorry but no one is so interesting that I want to read twenty tweets in a row from them nor am I pleased about them monopolizing the real estate on "my" [my being the operative word here] Twitter page.  According to Farrell Kramer's "How Often Should You Tweet" the optimal amount of time between tweets to maximize people actually clicking on a link is either 30 to 60 minutes or every 2 to 3 hours. I know that most of us have a relatively limited amount of time to spend on Twitter and returning to Twitter every one or two hours is cost prohibitive...in a time sense. But writing and then publishing twenty or more tweets in five to ten minutes will get you unfollowed in a hurry. 

So on the off chance that you may not realize there are some great applications out there to help you schedule your tweets and therefore become a whole lot less annoying, let me mention a couple of the best.

• HootSuite - Not only does HootSuite give you the ability to schedule your tweets out into the future but it also allows you to manage more than one Twitter account from the same panel. This is especially useful for someone like myself who manages several Twitter accounts dealing with different interests. If you're a statistical kind of person...HootSuite also provides data on click throughs...number of mentions...and other fun facts about your account.
• TweetLater - Has all the functionality of HootSuite along with the added functionality of being configured to automatically follow anyone who follows you or unfollow anyone who...well...unfollowed you. Personally I don't use these features and prefer to make my own follow|unfollow decisions all by myself but they may be useful to you.

3. Infomercial Dudes - I have a Twitter account so that I can hopefully connect with people who's interests are similar to mine and from whom I can hopefully learn something. My Twitter account is not for your commercials. I don't want to buy your ShamWows...or your eBooks...or learn how to get 1,000 followers in sixty minutes [see how I feel about the popularity contest thing above]. Don't get me wrong...an occassional plug for your product is fine...but if ALL you tweet about is how to get rich in 30-days...you're unfollowed. P.S. When I want to buy a product or service I go to Google so make sure your SEO is up to date.

4. Narcissistic Twitter Addicts - Contrary to what many self-absorbed Twitter addicts believe, I don't care if you're at the airport. Believe it or not I don't care if you're having a bologna sandwich for lunch chased with jalepenos or that your dog Boom Boom just boom boomed on the carpet. BUT, your airport visit might be interesting if you just had your first encounter with a Hare Krishna member and you included a link to a site defining the religion or if your Boom Boom post included a link to a site on carpet stain removal. As Wendy's so efficiently used in their early commercials...I want to know "where's the beef". If I routinely can't find any substance in your tweets I don't need to see them.

5. Triple X Picture Queens - Do I even need to explain this? These "followers" don't just get unfollowed...they get blocked.