5 Less Obvious Twitter Netiquette Mistakes

Maybe I’m not a Twitter Netiquette expert but in recent days and weeks I collected 5 mistakes that either I committed myself or were committed by others that really alienate me or other people without being that obvious.

1. Don’t complain about your Twitter followers (just unfollow or block those you don’t like). I complained in a blog post about the overt linkification of Twitter and promptly people stopped retweeting my links
2. Do not participate in a fight on Twitter. This one guy I followed who once retweeted me was verbally attacking a seemingly female Twitter user and insulting her in a really ugly way. I send him a “keep calm” message but he and some of his followers just went on justifying swearing on Twitter telling me that it’s probably my fault when I can’t take it. His tweet is now deleted but my mood on that day deteriorated and I still feel odd when reading this guy’s tweets. I know I should just unfollow without complaining but I just can’t heed my own advice.
3. Do not send “direct messages” to followers you don’t follow back, otherwise they can’t reply to you.
4. Do not follow people by automatically matching keywords from their profile using a bot. Probably 100+ of my now 942 followers are chefs, recipe sites and restaurants. (Remember my name is Tad Chef.) It’s obvious that you haven’t even taken a look on my profile. Amazingly enough I get more and more of those “followers”. I think I’ll resort to blocking from now on.
5. Do not unfollow 99% of your followers in a day. I checked a one year old most popular search marketers on Twitter list and then checked their follower/followed numbers again with a tool that compares those numbers historically. 2 of the most prominent then and now just unfollowed 10k+ people which matched approx. 99% of the people they followed. Now how bad does that look?

What do you think? Is it just me or are these acceptable? Am I not “man enough”? What other less obvious Twitter netiquette mistakes are there people should know about?

Source: Seoptimise Blog