How to Lose a Twitter Follower in 10 Days

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

Edward Stern is a guest blogger for My Dog Ate My Blog and writes for Guide to Online Schools.

The notification pops in your e-mail: “@SoAndSo is now following your tweets.” You are ecstatic! You are joyful! You have one more person who has deemed you worthy of a follow, of learning more about you and your ventures, of being an online friend that could grow into a devotee. Getting a new follower is easy; keeping one is the hard part. There are many ways to make a follower lose interest and hit the big “unfollow” X on your profile info. What was once a beautiful thing is now no more, over the span of 10 days in one follower’s tweeting life.

Day 1: After hitting “follow,” @SoAndSo is interested in seeing what you will have to offer in their timeline. After their follow, they get a follow from you and an immediate direct message of the generic kind. This sends up a red flag that maybe their choice in a follow was not the wisest. Other tweeters would immediately unfollow following an automated DM, but this one is willing to give the misguided soul another chance.

Day 2: Following the poorly decided DM, there is nothing. You do not tweet, and they lose interest. Maybe they even forget they followed you in the first place.

Day 3: After silence, there are a few scant tweets. These tweets are boring, bland, and inane. They @ no one, they follow no trending topics. They talk about what you had to eat for dinner in no clever terms. Your tweets are worthless, and @SoAndSo has begun to ignore them, but won’t unfollow yet. You see, @SoAndSo is the most patient, forgiving, and compassionate follower in the history of Twitter.

Day 4: The automated direct messages continue! @SoAndSo has received a DM from you asking them to check out your website. There is even a typo, and they still have no idea what your website is about.

Day 5: You tweet too much information, and @SoAndSo is pretty grossed out but will forgive the slip-up. It sucks that you have a rash, but no one on twitter really wants to know that.

Day 6: From relative silence comes an explosion of chatter. Your tweets are dominating @SoAndSo’s timeline, one right after the other! They cannot see delight through your tweets! It is suffocating, it is over bearing, and worse yet, you have nothing of value to say.

Day 7: The constant chatter continues! @SoAndSo is still being patient, but this is getting annoying, especially because now all your tweets are about what you have to offer to the world and how great you are. They decide to wait and see if this spamming continues.

Day 8: The spamming has now continued, and you are adding hashtag after hashtag to everything! You tweet about all the trending topics of the day, sometimes not even saying anything clever, just tweeting the hashtag alone! @SoAndSo feels sorry for you and your lack of twitter expertise and so does not want to unfollow—yet.

Day 9: @SoAndSo can’t believe their eyes—you’re still tweeting every waking second, and now you’re @-ing celebrities and important figures, telling them to “follow back so I can DM you something important.” Your tweets reek of desperation, but @SoAndSo seems some consolation in it all: at least Barack Obama, P.Diddy, and Ashton Kutcher will never give the time of day to your @s and so will never associate your twitter handle and what you represent with awful tweeting etiquette.

Day 10: You did, you really did. You made a tasteless joke that has no place in the public sphere, or anywhere really. @SoAndSo will absolutely not stand for that. Nor will anyone else—now you have no followers.

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About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here.