Why People Don’t Read Your Tweets

Look out: you may have lots of followers on Twitter, but c'mere, I'll tell you a secret: people may not be reading anything you post.

It's no revelation that social media has exploded in popularity. According to recent research, Social Networking will be a more popular communication channel than voice by 2015. While Facebook is huge, for my money, the number one player in the world of the quick update, especially on mobile devices, is still Twitter.

Recently reported to be valued at $4.5 billion (with a "B"!), Twitter isn't going away any time soon. Although, my personal open note to Twitter: please remember what you do best, and don't try to change to an all-stop-shop. I'm a big fan of apps that focus on one thing or area and do it well.

When I first downloaded the app I use for Twitter on my phone, I was checking it every time the alert sounded that I had new tweets. But pretty quickly, I noticed some patterns in frivolous tweets that started irritating me...so much so, I usually ignore the notification now. And that's no good for anyone: people with relevant tweets are not getting their message out to me, and I'm missing out on potentially great information. Instead of giving up, though, I decided to tell you about some practices in tweets that bother me, and will cause me to ignore or even "un-follow" people. These are patterns I try to avoid in my tweets, and I think you should as well.

Patterns that will get you un-followed on Twitter:

1. Failure to understand your audience - Is your Twitter account a professional account, a personal account, a marketing account, or news account? Your followers started following you presumably for a reason. Keep your posts relevant to that reason. For a great success story, look at the account "s**tmydadsays." His name is Justin, and he does just one thing with his account. He focuses on the funny. His Twitter bio says it all:
   "I'm 29. I live with my 74-year-old dad. He is awesome. I just write down s**t that he says"
   And he's parlayed that into a book and television show deal. At the time of this writing, he has over 2 million followers. And what I find even funnier is that HE is only following ONE person...LeVar Burton. Even that is just funny. He understands his audience.
   
2. Frivolous Personal Updates - This is related to pattern #1, but deserves its own mention. This has even been lampooned in TV commercials:
   
   People following your professional Twitter account likely don't care that you're "sitting on the patio." I pulled up a frightening number of results just searching the phrases "at the laundromat" and, even worse, "thinking about nothing" on Twitter.
   
3. Personal Conversations - Holding a lot of conversations with another user, that your followers aren't a part of, gives them only half the conversation. You're leaving them out and cluttering their tweets. Use Twitter's Direct Message function instead. Then, it stays between you and the recipient.
   
4. Running Commentary – You should tweet the important tweets, but avoid a long string of tweets on the same topic. Sometimes, people will sit at an event and continually tweet about what they're watching or doing. I'm not complaining about pearls of wisdom from the speaker (which I would like to hear too, assuming I'm not there myself), or pictures of the action. Those are great. I'm talking about the commentary without substance, like this:
   1. 5:32 p.m. "Boarding the plane to L.A. now"
      
   2. 5:35 p.m. "A guy just sat next to me"
      
   3. 5:38 p.m. "Closing the airplane door now."
      
   4. 5:39 p.m. "I hope my flight will be on time."
      
   5. 5:40 p.m. etc., etc., etc…
      
      

These are my biggest pet peeves that will make me un-follow someone on Twitter. What are yours?