The four things I hate about Twitter

My ‘social-media-network-of-choice’ is Twitter. I love its immediacy, its brevity and transparency. It’s a fantastic source of news, a direct route to customer service departments of national brands, and a way to engage with your business community.

But there are some things which I hate about it.

By far the worst culprit in my books is the autoresponder. Why oh why would anyone think that just because I’ve followed them on twitter I want to get a direct message inviting me to ‘just pop over and like our Facebook page’?  Or one which says ‘thanks for following. Sign up for our emails’ or ‘Watch our little fun intro’. No I don’t. Happy if it’s a person contacting me, but not a little algorithm tripped into action by a follow.

The second is the WOW brigade. Now I’m assuming this is just youthful exuberance, but honestly, seeing a tweet from someone which says ‘Wow, the best thing ever has happened’ or ‘Fantastic!’ is the social media equivalent of one of my teenage diaries that I found recently. On May 9th the entry read “this is a day I’ll never forget”. AND THAT WAS IT. I have no idea what happened, and no clues. How frustrating is that?

Third are the egg people. Happily there aren’t too many any more, but posting a profile picture isn’t difficult. It doesn’t even have to be a photo of you.

And finally, the accounts who spend their entire timeline haranguing others. ‘Hey @amandatigerfish, we’d love to see you at our exhibition’ (or whatever), and when I look at their previous tweets, they’ve just hustled loads of other people in the same way. As ever, a social network isn’t just a one way platform to shout. It’s about engagement, being social and er, networking.

What are the aspects of Twitter that you hate?