Twitter

Thanking people for retweets is dumb.

There, I’ve said it.

You don’t have to take my word for it. I’m not one of those social media gurus that are all over the interwebs who give “expert” advice. I’m just a regular guy who thinks that Twitter is fun. It could be even more fun, or at least less annoying at times, if people stopped doing certain things.

Thank You Tweets

We retweet because we read something that is worth sharing.  The tweet is either: funny, hard-hitting, or exceedingly clever — all good reasons. The thank you tweet is the opposite of that. It is dull and not worth sharing. Yes, I know that people feel that it’s the polite thing to do and that social media experts recommend doing it, but I still say don’t. It’s irritating. I’ve done it, and have felt silly each time. If you do send thank you tweets, at least don’t place a period before the @reply.

A better idea is to wait for the person to tweet something that you like, and retweet that. They will appreciate that more than a thank you tweet.

Foursquare Updates

Help me, Lord! What possible good can come from these cryptic GPS driven announcements?

“Hey, I’m over here!”

Nonsense.

Follow Fridays

These are a good idea for letting your followers know of other people that you think they should follow. When I do it, I select an individual, not a traffic jam of every possible username that can be crammed into a tweet. No one clicks on those. If your Follow Friday tweet says that so and so is a good person to follow and you tell us why, I’ll usually check them out. If you just throw a bunch of @Names at me, no dice.

Celebrities

There is no correlation between earning a living as an athlete or entertainer and being a good tweeter. None!

If you are famous for making movies, there is no reason for me to believe that you are able to entertain me without a script. If you can whack a baseball deep into the night, it doesn’t mean that your tweets will engage me.

I’ve looked in on a few celebrities and I was thoroughly unimpressed. Hey, it’s my Twitter stream, so I’m allowed to be picky.

Rapid Fire Tweeting

For some, like me, tweets come in spurts. Something in the news gets us amped-up and we send off a string of frenzied tweets. Some of the best tweets occur during those moments when an emotional response drives us. Others are occasional tweeters. They wait until they come up with a good line. Because they tweet so little, it’s easy to miss their gems, mostly because of the third type of tweeter – the scorched earth tweeters. These folks clutter timelines by tweeting at an astounding rate for prolonged periods of time. Every thought that they have is simultaneously conveyed to the world. They can’t really believe that their followers are that into them, can they?

My mother loves me, but even she wouldn’t want to be exposed to that kind of thought intimacy.

Auto Tweets

Tweeting, like all social media, is supposed to be interactive. What’s less interactive than scheduling tweets and then walking away? A one-time auto tweet announcing your latest blog post is one thing, but the same tweet (or group of tweets) repeated day after day is too much to take.

I’m warning you. I have a mouse and I’m not afraid to use it to unfollow if I see that tweet about something that happened last month one more time!

Not Following Back

If I start following you, I expect to be followed back. You are under no obligation to do so, of course, but you shouldn’t be surprised if I unfollow as a result. We don’t have to be best buds, or anything like that, but a one-way dialogue just doesn’t interest me.  Last week, I tweeted about what does interest me.

I use the free justunfollow service to identify non-followers, with oldest non-followers listed first. Spend too much time on this list, and you’re gone. They also have made it easy to unfollow everyone and start over. Depending on the day, this is a tempting proposition.

There you have it – one man’s plan for making Twitter better. As you can see, I don’t have a lot of followers, so this post may seem to be sour grapes… but it’s not.

I would just like to enjoy a less noisy, less egocentric, and more interactive Twitter.

I know, That’s crazy talk!

For now, I’ll just keep looking until I find tweeps that entertain me the way that I want to be entertained.

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If you tweet, what do you like or dislike about the experience?

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