Why I unfollowed you on Twitter.

I am no Twitter expert by any means.  In fact, I freely admit to having neophyte status. “Tweeting” for only a little over a week, and tweeting often, I already have a good strong sense of the kind of things I want (and don’t want) to see floating by on my TweetDeck. Therefore, the following list is extremely personal, and is by no means meant as any kind of advice for anyone else. These are just my own personal perceptions. Some things may resonate with you, others may not. Your mileage may vary.

-Nothing personal. I never saw you engaging another person–even one another person–in a personal way; instead, I saw a steady stream of one-sided tweets, whether they were promotional marketing Tweets or quotations from famous people. Even one “yes, thank you, David!” would have kept me from unfollowing you. If I want to read Eckhart Tolle, I’ll buy his book, thank you. Ditto for Bartlett’s Famous Book of Quotations.

-You tweet on steroids. In other words, silence, then fifteen to twenty tweets in a row, a seven inch string of cloned avatars….bang bang bang….all promoting your product or service. Then, silence again. No personal interaction, no personal discussion,  just a stock market ticker of what you’re selling—twenty in a row.

-Your very first DM message to me was spam, or Billy Mays has nothing on you. I know it’s impossible to thank everyone who follows you personally, or acknowledge someone who refollowed you. But please, don’t send me a message about how you can help me with home loans or building the perfect kitchen after one of us follow the other. I’d rather have nothing. If your first interaction with me is impersonal or sales-y, I can’t click that “unfollow” button fast enough.

-It’s not easy being green, green, green. Hey, I’m a good American citizen. I recycle, and I buy non-incandescent bulbs and I have spent a lot of money to insulate my drafty 200-year old home. However, I do not belong to the Church of “Green” and have no intention of riding a bike to the store, buying local produce at obscene prices or foregoing my refrigerator (with all its nasty, evil freon) in favor of an Ed Norton-style icebox. The Green “Movement” has become a  new religion, and the zealotry is incessant, and, not to put too fine a point on it, is getting kinda creepy. If every Tweet is 140 letters of guilt for not using fabric bags at my supermarket, or how I can make my business more green (and therefore acceptable), I’m outta here.

-You are vigilant at keeping up with Ashton Kutcher’s follower count, or tweet incessantly about the fact that Oprah now has one of her many minions tweeting in her name. I simply don’t care. In fact, if I was a rich woman, I’d give twenty bucks to everyone who unfollowed Mr. Kutcher. For the celebrities who actually engage their fans personally on Twitter, this does not apply. Snarky remarks about the supposed ugliness of Susan Boyle’s eyebrows, courtesy of Tina Fey, would be universally lambasted had it been written by a non-celebrity. I’d much rather tweet with a plumber who’s passionate about his work and shows a modicum of interest in mine.  In fact, I am not impressed by the number of your followers. What impresses me is your personal engagement and interest. (Oh, by the way, I heard that some newcomer Scottish singer is slated to replace that Sarah Palin lookalike on SNL. I’ll keep you posted.)

-Your hashtags take up your whole tweet, and are all equally incomprehensible.

-Twitter Ice. You consistently ignore a compliment, question or response to one of your own questions or pleas for assistance.

-Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow were separated at birth. Left or right, you have *very* strong, idealogue political opinions that may occasionally morph into angry rants. I am not apolitical, it’s just that I want Twitter to be a healthy mix of resource and information sharing, people helping one another, and healthy, respectful promoting.  Ditto for extremely religious oriented tweets. Not anti-religion, I just think politics and religion in such a generic social setting cannot possibly have a happy outcome. This extreme polarization is no surprise given today’s political climate. It’s gotten so severe that whenever I hear a moderate thinker speak, I actually give them a grateful sigh of thanks. But I wouldn’t tweet it. (BTW, want to know what a moderate thinker is? It’s someone whose opinion you usually cannot safely predict most of the time.)

Certainly there is no definitive “right” or “wrong” with how to use Twitter, even though there may be some universally accepted forms of politesse. To me, Twitter is a wonderful way to get to know supremely talented and interesting people throughout the world, and, for an artist or business owner, an uprecedented way to get one’s name out there with head-spinning rapidity.  As a wealth of streaming, up-to-the-minute information, news and resources, Twitter cannot be touched. But like everything else, there is a wheat/chaff separation process, and the above happens to be mine.

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