Five Things I Won’t Do On Twitter
January 21, 2013 10 Comments
I love Twitter. It’s a real-time pulse of the world, or at least, my part of the world and I like to keep it relatively simple. People do a lot of stuff on Twitter, some good, some bad and some down-right nasty, but I give this to you, today, a list of things I WILL NOT do.
1. I will not ask you to ‘like’ my Amazon/Facebook/Smashwords book page. I do click ‘like’ buttons on things that I know I like. If I read a book and I like it, then I’ll click, but I don’t go around spamming people to like my stuff when I know they haven’t read it. In my opinion, it amounts to begging, and I don’t beg. Period.
2. I will not #follow4follow. Honestly, I have two words for people who do this – fuck off. People F4F irk the crap outta me. I find it hollow and self-serving. I have a rule; I follow people I’m interested in, but I’m not going to drop them if they don’t follow me back. Grow up. This isn’t high school.
3. I will not spam hashtags with annoying pleas to “Read my book!” “Read my blog!” A link to my new posts come up on Twitter and I do a bit of promo around the time my books come out, but that’s about it. I won’t bombard you with this shit. I saw this a lot in hashtag groups, so much so that I no longer visit these groups. Thank you assholes, you ruined something for me.
4. I will not constantly re-tweet. I don’t mind sharing tidbits or info from people I follow, but I won’t fill my stream with just re-tweets. I like to talk to people too.
5. I will not #MM and #FF. I haven’t seen many of these lately and I’ll explain why I don’t do it. I used to, back when I was first on Twitter, but then I thought, my preferences of what I like is different to other people’s, and what if someone follows someone else and it turns out they DON’T like that person? How do I look to that follower now? I suggested they follow someone that wasn’t a match? I don’t know, I understand the concept, I just don’t like it.
About Darke Conteur
Darke Conteur 
Awesomeness! @ArmandAuthor put your post on my radar. I agree with what you are saying 100%, and I would like to add an additional 5 commitments:
6) I will not thank you for following me because that’s degrading. But I will follow you back if I want to connect with you; @ mention you in a meaningful way, or retweet your content that I like so you know I hear you and like what you’re doing.
7) I will not send automated or unsolicited DMs at no time!
8) I will not exclusively spew my facebook status updates or foursquare checkings or instagram posts to twitter. If I have to push content from third-party apps, I will only do that on a selective basis, when it makes sense.
9) I won’t steal your great tweets, and tweet them without credit to you, pretending they are mine..
10) I will not solely be a broadcaster, I will create tools to listen to what my connections are saying that are meaningful to me and my community on a daily basis (like “lists” or a published or unpublished paper.li account; or a flipboard account).
Yes! These are great too! I think these could apply to Facebook status’ too. 😀
I agree with all your points, although I don’t know what #MM or #FF are. I think it’s wise to not spam people, and I love the “it’s not high school” line. So true!
I still can’t make Twitter useful for me, but I keep working at it.
#MM is Maniac Monday or something like that. There’s #WW=Writer Wednesday and #FF=Follow Friday. I see twitter like a water cooler. I don’t tweet everything I do, but I like to start conversations and see where they go.
I don’t use Twitter much but I am finally learning what Tweetdeck can do. This week I’ll be on there all week with prescheduled tweets for the Indies 4 Hire event, but aside from that I read from the sidelines. I can’t hang with the Twitter pros.
Twitter is like the other social media’s, you should take it or leave it. BTw, I’m upset I missed the talk on whether blogs promote your books. 😦
Pop in anyway if you have questions or want to add to the dialog. Gwen and I will be in and out all day.
Cool! Thanks! 😀
The most annoying thing to me are the posters that all on their timeline is just book promos. Nothing about themselves; just book promos and more book promos. Basically spam-producing robots.
Yeah, I drop them faster than anything else. Nice to see you back online! 😀