It’s pretty rare that I make the decision to unfollow someone on Twitter, but it does happen now and then. Here are five reasons why I might unfollow you:
1. You have too many automated tweets
You know what my major pet peeve is? When someone has too many automated tweets get sent out for a new post. And they all get sent out at the same time. Here’s what I mean:
A person publishes a new post. Then the following occurs:
- WordPress automatically tweets about the new post.
- The new post gets automatically mentioned on Facebook.
- Facebook is set to sync with twitter, so a new tweet automatically goes out about the Facebook message (which was also about the blog post).
- Then there are one or two other automated messages that happen but I’m not sure where they come from *facepalm*
So in the end, we’re left with one blog post and 3-4 instant tweets about that blog post. Blergh.
I don’t want to call anyone out, so I’ll show you a fake example. But this fake example is actually based on a real screenshot I took, so the frequency and number of updates is something that really happens!
2. You’re constantly tweeting about giveaways
I don’t really enter giveaways. I used to right when I started blogging, but I don’t enter them anymore. So if you’re constantly tweeting about giveaways you’ve entered, I’m gone.
3. You go on a retweet spree
I don’t mind a few retweets here and there, but if you suddenly retweet like 5-10 messages in a short period of time, especially if they’re messages I don’t care about, I’ll stop following you. Sometimes a person will retweet like 10 sports-related messages/updates/scores and I’m just not interested.
4. All your tweets are automated
If every single one of your tweets is an automated link to a blog post, then I have no interest in following you. If I want to only see your blog posts, I’ll subscribe to your blog. But on Twitter, I want to see personality, life/book updates, and interactions.
5. You tweet about something REALLY REALLY REALLY bad
I think this has only happened like once… but an example would be if you tweeted about how you pirate books or think pirating books is okay. I don’t want to associate with someone like that.
All of the above + constant cat pictures. WHY? (This especially bothers me if I find most of the other tweets interesting, and then I have to decide whether they’re interesting enough to scroll past what feels like 5000 cat pictures).
Hahaha, for me it depends on the cat/photo. For example, I do follow one “cute animals” twitter account or something and I love looking at those photos. But then other times I see one blogger posting 230975023952 photos of their own cat and I get tired of it.
Too many giveaway tweets. People I can’t remember why I followed. Inactive accounts.
Yeah I follow TONS of people who I don’t remember why I followed in the first place X_X I went on a huge pruning spree a few weeks ago and just unfollowed everyone whose name/account I didn’t recognize.
If they are posting about things I don’t care about a lot I might unfollow them but I don’t really mess with twitter that much..I might tweet things here and there but I couldn’t tell you if someone unfollowed me or not cause I don’t really pay attention. 🙂
Since my twitter feed is out of control anyway I dont usually unfollow, but you listed some great reasons not to follow someone. I also don’t want to follow only giveaway tweeters. I go on a RT spree sometimes and I do RT when someone shares my post, but I hope my RTs aren’t too much. I do share a lot of other people’s posts. One thing that will make me unfollow is automated messages. I hate automatic DMs with a passion. Wish there was a way to turn off DMs completely.
I do that now and then too. I think it’s just super excessive RTing that annoys me. For example:
* Someone loves sports (I don’t) and RTs 5 tweets in a row about sports scores/news. Then I start to notice that they do this often (5 RTs in a row maybe once a day). If I see it becoming a pattern, I unfollow.
* Someone who RTs LOADS of tweets/convo snippets that I’m not interested in—frequently.
Neither of those are necessarily bad to do, it just all boils down to them RTing things that don’t interest me.
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Automatic DMs are HORRIBLE!! Luckily I rarely get those anymore, but they annoy me too.
If you go on someone’s Twitter profile on the website, you can turn off their retweets. I’ve done that for people who excessively RT but who I still want to follow.
I think one of my biggest problems is that I don’t *think* you can do that on the mobile app easily, and that’s where I most often run into the problem.
I think it’s because you can see who RT on the app, but you can’t actually click their name to get to their profile. (Unless I just haven’t figured it out yet… lol.)
I’m totally guilty of #2, but I like giveaways, so I’m going to do the daily tweets. I don’t know if it makes it less or more annoying, but I do them all at once to get them out of the way. So there’s a huge blast of tweets in the early morning, and then nothing for the rest of the day.
#1 only really bugs me when it’s for blogs with multiple bloggers and all of them have their accounts linked to everything, so instead of just 4 tweets of the same post at the same time, it’s like 12!!! But thankfully I don’t see it too often, since it seems like most bloggers have their posts set to midnight their time, and I’m usually in bed or at least not online much after 9pm. I don’t even know how to get Facebook to tweet posts…
But I’m not big on unfollowing. The only reason I’d unfollow someone is if I just stopped following their blog, which usually only happens when they’re inactive anyway, or just quit.
I think doing them all at once is a good way to do it. 🙂 And I’m sure there are A TON of people who love entering giveaways, so I bet they appreciate that. 🙂
I unfollow people on twitter if all they have are automated tweets, giveaway tweets, or they haven’t gone on twitter for over two months.
the giveaway one bleurgh. i really hate people who only tweet giveaway links. like, isn’t that spam????
I hate numbers one and two. I hate how rafflecopter encourages you to be spammy. I enter a lot of giveaways, but I’ll only pick one active giveaway at a time to tweet about, or I don’t do that entry option.
Another thing that bugs me is constant tweeting, automated or not. You may have time to tweet 50 times per day, but I don’t have time to read them all and they’re making it harder to see other people’s tweets.
Also, I just actually looked at my main twitter feed for a change, instead of my Hootsuite dash of Twitter lists, and another blog tweeted the same blog post 7 times within 2 minutes. Yiiiiikes.
Yeah there are some people who practically have conversations with themselves. They send like 10 tweets in a row, as if they’re writing a blog post. And it’s just them talking about stuff—they’re not actually replying to people. And they can’t fit the message in one tweet, which is why they send like 5+ at once to continue their message.
If you have that much to say, write a blog post about it.
Wow, interesting post Ashley! I’m super new to Twitter – just joined when I started blogging last month – and I’m still figuring a lot of stuff out. I haven’t been unfollowing people, but I have been using the mute and block feature quite liberally. And I’ve been utilizing lists to make sure I see the tweets from people I want to see since my “home” feed just gets overwhelming for me. I’m sure the more accustomed I get to using Twitter my habits will change.
I kind of envy you! I wish I could start over on twitter, because I feel like I follow SO many people who I don’t even know and I can’t remember why I followed them.
So if I have one piece of advice, it would be: don’t just follow anyone. Carefully consider whether or not you want to follow a person before you do it.
Pretty much all of those things cause me to unfollow people too. The RTing one is the only one that doesn’t. I usually don’t mind retweets, but when it gets really bad, I usually just turn off that person’s RTs so I don’t see them.
My biggest annoyance is definitely the entire automated tweet thing. The only point to that would be if I used Twitter as a place to keep up on blogs. Maybe some people do that, but it seems like a terrible way to do that. Twitter, for me, is for something a bit different.
Yeah I don’t use twitter to follow blogs at all. If I want to follow a blog, then I subscribe via email or RSS.
I understand some promotion (a few tweets a day) but if you have 5 automated tweets going out AT ONCE or most of your tweets are automated then you’re not using twitter right. 😉
I do not usually unfollow anyone on twitter. Unless you do something totally offensive, I can’t seem me unfollowing someone since I mainly just scroll through my feed anyways. Though, the more I think about it, the more I realize you make some valid points. In fact I think I might need to do some housekeeping on my follow list.
I recently did some housekeeping on my list. I used to be like you: I didn’t unfollow anyone, I just kept scrolling. But then I realized how bored I was of my feed. I was scrolling past 90% of the tweets because I didn’t care about most of them or they just seemed spammy (giveaways, promos, ads, etc.).
So then I unfollowed TONS of people I didn’t know/recognize and I made a habit of unfollowing a particular person if I realized I didn’t like their tweets much. Now my feed is a lot better and more enjoyable. 🙂
I don’t like tons of sarcasm ONLY. I realize that people are trying to be funny, but sometimes it gets old. You know what I’m talking about. Real life stuff isn’t always sarcastic and negative. I also will unfollow if I notice that goodreads updates give too much information about the plot of a book away…I don’t like that! I like to find out about a story on my own. I have just learned about the mute option on twitter and it’s made it much nicer to take those pesky naysayers and spoilers out of my feed so I don’t have to hurt their feelings if they’re people that I know and really do enjoy.
You make great points!
Yeah sometimes I get REALLY awkward about unfollowing people. I feel bad. 🙁 Especially because sometimes it’s not that I don’t like the person, it’s just that we don’t share enough interests for me to want to read their updates. So the mute feature is nice!
Great reasons. I agree with the giveaway tweets. I enter a lot of giveaways but rarely choose the tweet option. I haven’t gotten to linking my posts in lots of places so it’s good to know you could end up with a blog post tweeted seven times in less than 10 minutes. Ekk!
You’re still following me so yay! 😀
♥
Yikes. I am not really active on Twitter, so other than the occasional tweet here and there it’s all mostly just links to my latest blog post – only one, at least I managed to get it down to that. Will have to up my social activeness this year. Thanks for the post, Ashley 🙂
I think it’s so cool that you were able to edit a Twitter screenshot! I don’t even know the fonts. 😀
And I do get annoyed by the whole automated thing, but the person I’m following doesn’t really do it to that extreme, and I’m okay with it. There’s also the fact that I don’t really check Twitter much, and I’m just a constant scroller on it.
Arial/Helvetica Neue 😀
I don’t mind tweets about giveaways as long as that is not the only reason you have a Twitter account. If that is the only thing I see in your feed, I will unfollow you.
I also get frustrated when the only posts are coming from Facebook. If I have to go to Facebook every time to see you post, why should I follow you on Twitter. I guess I’m more likely to see the post on Twitter than Facebook, but the two platforms are different and should be treated as such.
Lastly, I get frustrated by the barrage of retweets, as well. When my stream is all of a sudden flooded with tweets and then I see that there are 20 retweets from all the same person is bugs me.
I have, admittedly, gone on a retweeting spree once or twice. Usually at 5am when I’m not asleep anymore but not quite ready to form my own coherent thoughts. Then I totally tweeted and called myself out on it 🙂
Also, yes to #4. Whenever I find a new blog I like I go check them out on twitter. If it’s just posts to their blogs I won’t follow them because, like you said, I’m already going to follow their blog. If I follow them also on twitter I want more of their personality and interaction. I can understand why someone might want their twitter to just be an alternate sort of rss feed, I just don’t need that when I have feedly 🙂
I agree with all of your reasons – basically anything that removes the ‘social’ from social media. Something that really winds me up, and I will unfollow someone for if they do it repeatedly, is saying ‘I’m 6 followers away from [MILESTONE], please retweet so I can reach [MILESTONE]!’. It just annoys me.
Yeah I wouldn’t want people to follow me JUST so I can reach a milestone. I want them to follow me because they actually want to, without being prompted.
I see #1 a lot — it’s a very easy thing to check and fix, too. (And on that note? Not a fan of Facebook posts to Twitter. Majority of the time the update gets cuts off. I think I have those muted in TweetDeck.)
What causes me to unfollow people most? Excessive negativity and complaining. If it feels like every tweet I’ve seen from a person has been negative, I’ll hop over to their Twitter feed (to make sure I’m not just seeing all the negative ones) to check. Usually, if it’s a bunch of complaints, I’ll unfollow. I don’t need it.
Excellent point! And that made me think of another that has come up recently: people who just won’t let things to. Like this recent Kickstarter drama. I was soooo sick of hearing about it after just a few hours. But some people drag it on and on and on and on and won’t stop talking about it.
I feel like whenever drama like this happens, some people just have a tendency to KEEP TALKING ABOUT IT. And some people want to do that—that’s fine. But I’m a VERY anti-drama/arguing kind of person. It just weighs me down and I don’t like to be stuck in the middle of it. So if someone won’t stop talking about the drama, I’ll probably mute/unfollow them.
People who whine, incessantly. That, I think, is everyone’s one-way ticket to unfollow-town. Hahaha.
I am SOOOOO tweeting this post! LOL
You hit the nail on the head Ashley! I love twitter, I am not really a huge “Facebooker” so Twitter is where I hand out if I’m doing bookish socializing (usually). And my #1 Pet Peeve is Automated posts from FACEBOOK! If I wanted to see constant Facebook links I would go on Facebook instead… I don’t mind blog posts that much because I don’t follow a ton of blogs via email so I get to see some posts i wouldn’t normally see. But I’m hoping that these peeps that are posting the blog posts also chatting on twitter too o.O
And another frustration I have is with Authors who ONLY tweet about their own book promotions, and do it every 5 minutes at that…
Great Post!
I’m terrible at using twitter, like I’ll totally forget about it for months and then randomly decide to use it again. But the one thing I have been trying to do is clean up my feed, because I followed so many people and companies in my first year of blogging that I’m just no longer interested in. I agree with all the reasons you listed, especially if the same link is tweeted a bunch of times!
Same here! I really regret following anyone and everyone in my first few months of blogging/twitter. I went on a HUUUGE cleaning spree a few weeks ago and I’m so glad I took the time to do that. 🙂 I just unfollowed every single author I didn’t recognize (eliminated tons of promo spam) and many other people/bloggers whose names didn’t ring a bell.
My current twitter account is really new (only a few days) and before now I never really used it properly. So I guess it’s more why I would not follow someone.
If they’re constantly posting links and retweeting I wouldn’t bother. I want to make friends. Same goes for those who tweet every second about the same exact things. I want to have conversations with my new friends.
Basically I’m here to make friends, chat and get involved in the bookish community. If you aren’t offering that I’m not going to keep following you. Selfish, but … well… I’m selfish.
I’m not on Twitter all that much, which is definitely something I want to work on this year. I think I’ve only unfollowed one person, and that was because she was so negative on Twitter. Everytime I checked in on Twitter, there was a tweet where she was complaining about something.
I suck at twitter. It’s just so busy for me. You’re probably one of the few people I tweet…
When I first joined twitter last year (I was late to the game) I think I just followed everyone who followed me, everyone who is an author, and everyone who had a book blog. Big mistake. Now my feed is full of people I’m not sure I know. While bloggers I actually talk to, I suddenly realize that I’m not even following them on twitter.
Plus, there is so much drama…
I know I’m guilty of the first one. Bloglovin send out like 2, WP sends another one and I think Tumblr sends another one. I keep forgetting to turn the others off…
I am so guilty of so many of these…
Oh gosh, I forgot about those automated tweets! Yeah, that annoys me when the same blog post is promoted via Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, etc. I followed someone once with two different accounts and then it would be published on BOTH accounts. I think I’m one of the people who can go through retweeting blitzes but I think it’s usually interesting? It’s usually when I’m waiting in the car and just have time to scroll through (rather than posting “I’m in the car! Woo!”).
Great post! Some people need to up their Twitter game. Lol.
I’m one of those people who are REALLY stingy about who they follow. I like to keep the number of people I follow to a manageable level, but I think I might be too extreme. 😛 Thankfully, I’m loosening up a bit now! But yeah, I agree with most of your reasons as to why I unfollow people. I’ve been lucky enough that many of the bloggers I follow don’t have too many automated tweets, but I get really annoyed for some reason when most of their tweets are automated ones of old posts. I don’t know why!
AND YES. I had a friend who retweeted basically everyone she followed, and I was so annoyed. I felt bad for unfollowing her, though, so I just muted her instead. 😛
Another reason I unfollow people on Twitter is if they have been absent for a long time. Like, their last tweet was two weeks ago? Unfollow. I just don’t feel the need to follow someone who’s not tweeting regularly anymore.
These are all very true! I actually need to unfollow some people as I’m following so many random accounts who I followed back when I first started Twitter and now I’m sitting with updates from people whose tweets I’m really not interested in! I unfollow if:
a) They retweet too much. I don’t mind a couple of retweets here and there but if it’s constant then it gets a bit much and I’ll unfollow.
b) Promotions. I followed a few authors and they were constantly promoting their books and tweeting about not much else, so I unfollowed then.
c) They’re crude or say things I don’t agree with. If someone swears a lot or tweets inappropriate things I will unfollow them because I hate it when people are so impolite and disrespectful.
Very interesting post! 🙂
Those constant giveaway tweets.. It’s really annoying when your whole account is based on you trying to win free stuff. I must admit that I tweeted about quite some giveaways in the beginning, but I soon learned that’s not how it works. I haven’t unfollowed anyone yet, but there are some accounts I could unfollow without any problem.
Ohh I don’t follow people who don’t tweet or interact with others. I find that Twitter is supposed to be a social place, so conversations are much needed. Also those contest giveaway Twitter accounts, ugh I disqualify anyone who has one if they entered. Honestly it annoys me because that’s all they want. FREE STUFF
I admit, I am an automated tweeter from my blog post. I don’t think it goes out more than once though. I am just never on twitter. I never got into it. So really I don’t know why i have one. But I do. I shouldn’t. So i don’t have any reasons to follow or unfollow on twitter. great post though. It makes a ton of sense. the over automated would bother me too.
I think sometimes I do #1 and it frustrates me when it happens. I do go through phases of using automated tweets but I’m new to it and I don’t really know what I’m doing a lot of the time so it can get a bit spammy. I don’t mean to do it though.
I unfollow people usually if they behave in a way that I think is inappropriate which usually means being bitchy about other bloggers or RTing something racist/sexist etc. I have no tolerance for things like that.
Retweeting sprees are the worst, not sure why, but they really rub me wrong. Or giveaway entering sprees. I don’t mind a tweet about a giveaway now and then, but if I see a list of giveaway tweets form the same account right after one another I unfollow.
Just like you I dont’t really unfollow a lot or maybe I just don’t spend enough time on twitter.
I’m guilty of the automated tweets and I’ve been wanting to fix that so thanks for this reminder! I’m really bad with keeping up with Twitter and Facebook. I rarely unfollow anyone since I am hardly on Twitter, but I do get annoyed when people tweet really bad things or too personal (there needs to be a TMI button because somethings people share are crazy!). I also get annoyed with seeing the personal conversations, they should do a private message instead.
I think I’m guilty of the multiple pings from one blog post, but it’s only because I have no idea where they are coming from. Obviously I signed up for some things and don’t remember what they are! Haha.
I think if you go to Settings > Apps you can see all the applications you’ve given access to and then revoke them if you want. 🙂
I go through blogluvin and a few other readers every night (well almost every night) and pick 10 blog posts I really enjoyed and schedule them on buffer to be tweeted at 1 hour intervals during the next day.
Some are reviews, some are giveaways, some are articles and some are book or movie related art or news. I “hope” that I strike a good balance that way. If I have a post of my own I manually do 1 day tweet, one night tweet and my pinterest pin gets shared to twitter the next day. (the only one that is automated.)
I have some of the strangest follows though. Like real estate agents. I don’t unfollow much but I am picky about who I follow in the first place.
Great post!
I just cleaned up my twitter feed recently. I unfollowed people who were inactive (of course), people who only posted stuff about giveaways or kindle books that cost 99 cents (I don’t even own a Kindle), and people who only posted updates on what page they are on or links to their blogs posts– I kind of want to hear your thoughts or I want a reason to interact with you.
OMG YES. I despise automated tweets. When I look at someone’s profile and see nothing but that, or nothing but tweets with links in them, I unfollow. Same for those that have nothing but giveaways. I personally hate to tweet giveaways at all, and I usually avoid it unless it’s something I’m really interested in.