I’m not a social media guru (most people that self-proclaim themselves as a social media guru aren’t either). I’m just a guy that’s been on Twitter for a while now and noticed a shocking number of tweets that have become increasingly annoying. Without trying to hurt any feelings, I have to say to some, “you’re using it wrong.”

“But wait,” you say. “There isn’t a rule book for Twitter. Who are you to tell me how to use it?”

First, there actually is a rule book for Twitter and most of the below suggestions are mentioned there. Second, go ahead and keep being annoying on Twitter and have fun with those bots and spammers following you. Third, maybe I’m clueless and these are all personal annoyances you can ignore 🙂

1) The Barrage of Retweets
A sudden burst of retweets where your feed becomes a frustrating list of other people’s thoughts makes me want to unfollow. There is absolutely nothing wrong with retweeting. It’s great. The problem becomes when you retweet ten things instantly or worse, when your entire feed is retweets. Do you really have no original thoughts?

2) Tweeting your Daily Follower Stats
Anyone active on Twitter is gaining and losing followers daily. Tweeting your stats for the day is a total waste of a tweet. Public shaming people who unfollow you is even worse. Be more interesting and stop telling us your follower counts.

3) Auto-DM’s
#DeathToAutoDM is one of the best hashtags ever created. Rachel Thompson’s great social media blog has a great post about how bad auto-DM’s are for your account. It turns out, using an Auto-DM causes a 245% increase in unfollows. Ouch. That’s all you need to know.

4) Daily News Digests
If you’re using an automated tool to tweet a daily update of news you read, please stop. It’s not adding any value to your feed and isn’t really coming from you. Twitter is all about personal engagement. Link to the news story you read and write a comment about why it interested you. Don’t let a robot do it for you.

5) Location Tweets
I’m very happy for you that you’re at 7-Eleven getting a Slurpy and felt the need to check-in there. Your FourSquare followers may be enraptured by this information. Your Twitter followers are not. Please turn off any automated tweeting of location check-ins.

6) Tweets with four (or more) Hashtags
How could your content possibly relate to four or more topics simultaneously? General rule: if your hashtags are more than half the size of your total post, you have too many.

7) Endless Inspiring Quotes
Do you really have so little interesting to say yourself that you have to use other people’s words to “fill time” in between useful tweets? If you have more than a couple of quotes tweeted in your feed per week, either come up with a quote of your own or don’t say anything at all.

8) Thanks for the Follow
There is no rule requiring others to follow you back or even stay followers of you after they initially follow you. They could unfollow tomorrow. (how awkward is that?) I don’t want your thanks for following you. If you are interesting (that’s thanks enough), I’ll stay with you. If not, I’m probably gone tomorrow.

9) Pinterest Pins
When you’re using Pinterest to pin different things, you’re probably going to do a lot of pins in a short amount of time. That’s the way it works on Pinterest. Please turn off the automated tweet for your pins. There’s nothing worse than checking your feed to find 25 pins in a row with links to Pinterest and no other info. Complete junk tweets.

10) #FollowFridays Without Telling Why
A list of Twitter users is worthless. Why should I follow them? (and no, you saying so is usually not good enough for me to follow). What made you want to recommend them? Tell me something interesting about this person and why you follow them. Don’t just #FF a bunch of twitter usernames.

I hope I haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Trust me, your Twitter account will be better and you’ll gain more followers if you follow these suggestions.