I saw a neat blog post on twitter from Asher (or Asheraw on Twitter) called 5 real reasons why I don't follow you back on twitter. After reading I had to agree, Asher made some great points. And I said so. Then one of my other followers, the insightful DrDollars asked if I was going to post about my own reasons and I said sure. And, without further delay, here they are:

1. Too Self Involved. If you follow me, I'm going to browse your twitter feed. If every single post you make is about you and what you did and how awesome you are, I won't follow. I like to see responses, retweets (RT), or any kind of conversation. Unless your posts are particularly informative I'm not going to bother.

2. Spammy. If I do happen to follow you and then notice that you tweet 15 posts all at once on a regular basis I'll probably stop following you. Its not even that you're not interesting, its just annoying. And normally it just ends up being spam.

3. Blog posts only. If your Twitter feed just exists as an RSS outlet for your blog I'm probably not interested. I'll just subscribe to your blog instead.

4. Follow ME! If you ever twitter those words, I'm not following you. Especially if you're new to twitter and that's all you're posting. C'mon, don't waste my time. To me, twitter is networking, and I want to learn something about you or what you do.

5. SalesTweets. I think its great to promote your business and your website but if you aren't reciprocating anything, its not fair. (See #1)

And my bonus reason: 6. You stopped following me. Every month or so I review my followers. There are people on Twitter who will follow you, wait for a return follow and then stop following you, just to boost their numbers. Its a pretty low trick, and its easy to spot since usually they also have one of the 5 above symptoms.

What makes you not follow someone, or unfollow someone you've been reading? Write a blog post about your top 5 reasons and drop a link! And if you twitter, I'll retweet you.

Tags: Asher, Follow, Reasons, Rules, Twitter, Unfollow

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Random, Veribatim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.