My Twitter Policy

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Twitter continues to confound me. People who I respect are treating it in the same realm as the second coming so I’ve decided to suspend my skepticism, at least for now. I’ve written about Twitter before, albeit in a slightly satirical way. Now I’ll get a just a little bit more serious.

My friend Rob McNealy, (TwitterID @robmcnealy), has a Twitter policy on his website that inspired me to write my own.

Here it is:

I do not use autofollow. I generally wait for a day or two before I reciprocate a follow because if you’re a crook or identity thief, it takes about that long for Twitter to notice and boot you off. By then, you’ll have disappeared from my list of followers and I won’t have to waste any time. Otherwise, I will generally reciprocate, but not always. I actually visit the profiles of people who follow me before I decide to follow them.

I may not follow you if your Avatar looks like this -> twitter-anon unless I know you personally or if you’re just starting out on Twitter.

I may not follow you if you identify yourself as a quick buck artist who promises to help people make guaranteed millions on-line with no effort while they sleep.

I may not follow you if the website linked to your profile doesn’t appear to have a real person or real company behind it.

If I detect the slightest hint of MLM or network marketing or other pyramid ripoff schemes on your profile, I will most certainly not follow you. Here’s why.

I don’t use Qwitter to see who’s unfollowing me, mostly because that would be vain and it would keep me up at night worrying, but if I ever catch someone following me and then unfollowing me immediately after I’ve reciprocated, look out, because that really pushes my hot button. What kind of egotistical phony would pretend to follow someone just to get another follower and then immediately disconnect from that person? You’re welcome to ignore me, but a least give me the illusion that you care about my inane tweets.

I may unfollow you if you are hellbent on pushing a political agenda. A tweet or two to identify yourself as a card-carrying commie or slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun won’t bother me, but if you expect me to be converted over to your point of view with a continual barrage of venom directed at your political opponents, well that won’t fly with me.

If every single post you make contains a link to your business and how I should visit your website or buy something from you, then I may unfollow you. A continual barrage of commercials is something I can get on TV or the radio if I really wanted it.

If your posts look like you queued them up and fired them from a machine gun, I may unfollow you. Spread it out, I don’t want your mug, as attractive as it may be, stretching from the top to the bottom of my Tweetdeck.

If you decide to make up a longform blog post, and then chop it up into 140 character segments and send it out sequentially, don’t be surprised if I unfollow you half way through the ordeal. Just put it in your blog and tweet the link.

Telling the world good morning or good night on Twitter is OK, just once. If you make it a daily habit out of it, I may not unfollow you, but I will find a way to ignore you.

I reserve the right to change (or periodically violate) these policies at any time.

Still hungry for some more, better, Twitter advice? Here a few articles on Twitter etiquette:

Twitter’s 10 commandments
Twitter’s top 10 18 do’s and don’ts

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