Thursday 31 March 2011

My Top Three Twitter Peeves

Had to mention something this month, and as I'm running short of time this topic will do, especially as it is fresh in my head.

Up until the last few days I have had two big Twitter peeves, but upon further thinking that has become three. In reverse order they are:

3) Duplicated Content

Frequently caused by users who have some kind of automatic feed publishing to their twitter account. While slightly irritating when journalists posting a blog post which is repeated shortly afterwards this is worst of all when some companies use this. I had to unfollow one online store recently which for some reason was tweeting every entry to one of their competitions. It all became a lot of clutter, so unfollowing became the only choice for me.

2) Tweet Chats

A slowly growing, very annoying trend, especially when they take place overnight (UK time). I typically wake up to 80-100 tweets, given that my interests lead to me following people in America. However when one of those users has a tweet chat which single-handedly increases that count by about 50 it reaches overkill. For me this is what chatrooms were invented for, not Twitter. If I want to follow up later I can hopefully get a transcript somewhere.

1) People Retweeting Secondary Accounts

This really winds me up, because frankly it looks desperate. There is nothing like an account mentioning another account (whether it be personal cause/business/etc.) in a casual way, only once they've done it five or six times you follow that link and find they have less than twenty followers. If I haven't followed within one or two mentions I'm not likely to, why continue to try to blundgeon me with this?

Of course they can't stop there, so they still pound away with repeated mentions of the second account, and even get to the point where they retweet their own tweets from the secondary account. What is it they say about people who talk to themselves?

(I know, it's the one way to guarantee you get a sensible answer. Ignore me.)

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