Twitter/Why unfollowed

From Strugglers
Revision as of 15:00, 17 October 2014 by Andy (Talk | contribs)

Jump to: navigation, search

Why I may have unfollowed you on Twitter

If I was following you on Twitter but then you noticed that I wasn't, it may have been for one of the following reasons. I state these things here so that no one can be surprised about it later on when I follow through on these promises.

I don't typically tell people why I have unfollowed them because most people don't react well to that and anyway it seems rather petulant. Also I'm not suggesting you need to have the same values as me. Just that I don't need to see it.

Retweeting competition links

A depressing trend on Twitter is for companies use Twitter retweets in the guise of a lottery in order to launch marketing campaigns that fake grass-roots support for their product and just get their message out there. I'm sure you've seen them:

Win a year's supply of Our Tea! Simply retweet this!
—Tea Company

This is just spam. I don't give a shit if someone wants to win a year's supply of tea or whatever (and yes! I 'have' been spammed with tweets for entering a competition to win a year's supply of tea). If the company told someone to email the same thing to everyone in their email address book then most people would rightly reject that idea as offensive. Yet somehow because it's Twitter they see fit to spread this rubbish.

It tells me nothing about what they actually think or believe in, which is why I followed them. It's purely selfish.

First time offenders will have retweets disabled in Twitter. Twitter seems buggy on this though and sometimes lets retweets through anyway. Also some competitions ask you to manually tweet a message. In these cases it will be unfollow time.

Being a corporate shill

As I work in tech, I follow a lot of other people who also work in tech. Many of these people tweet about their work using their personal account.

While I wish all my Twitter friends the best in their career, if they start retweet press releases and favourable reviews of their employer when I know they are not personally invested in what they are tweeting, I will unfollow. I would follow your corporate PR if I wanted to see that.

Something else

If you did any of the above then that's most likely why I unfollowed you. If you didn't though then who knows? Maybe it just wasn't my cup of tea? Sorry.