I’m here today to share a point or six (maybe more, who knows) about Twitter Respect. Simply put, things I find socially unacceptable when being my friend on Twitter. Your ideas might be different, and you might disagree with me. But right now, in the immortal words of Robbie from The Wedding Singer… Well, I have a microphone, and you don’t, SO YOU WILL LISTEN TO EVERY DAMN WORD I HAVE TO SAY!
Incidentally, in a post a couple of days ago I freely quoted (without proper credit) The Blues Brothers, but no one seemed to comment on it. For shame. All of you. Now, back to my Twitter Respect Ranting…
1. What is the damn point of following a million people that don’t care about you at all? The ‘follow me and I’ll follow you for an hour before I delete you and then try to get all your friends to follow me’ thing is stupid. I don’t see the point.
2. If you don’t follow me back within a reasonable amount of time (usually four weeks) I unfollow you, unless you are Neil Gaiman or JA Konrath or someone really cool that I read their tweets all the time. But, the real problem I have is that then you post that I unfollowed you… not sure why you do this. Hey, here’s a fun thing: follow me back to begin with, and I won’t have to delete you. And you won’t have to point out that you only bothered with me once I cut you off.
3. Not sure why, but DMs from people I don’t know are annoying. Oh, wait, I remember now: It’s because I try to be nice when you say ‘Thanks for the follow! Nice to meet you’ and I reply in kind, only to be told by Twitter than you don’t follow me so I can’t send it and I wasted my time! Guess what? You get unfollowed quicker than 30 days. Just sayin’.
4. I also hate initial DMs that give me a link to your website/Amazon page/free eBook giveaway… I can’t imagine this works for anyone trying to promote themselves and gets someone excited enough to say ‘Wow, thanks for the private spam! I am going to buy your book right now!’. How about saying hello, and then we can be nice first before you shove your work down my throat… and I can actually say nice things back since you also follow me. I promote my own work every day, but it’s drowned in with reblogs of cool posts I read, RT’s of other cool books I like and tweets to people that I converse with like a normal human being.
5. Posting your link for your book/band/website/crap using my twitter handle as a way to get people to notice you, since you have 147 followers and I (currently at 12:13 am when I’m writing this) have 12,867, all (OK, most) of which I earned by being nice and not beating them over the head with promotions for my work. I keep getting the ‘@ArmandAuthor: My character in my new book is a bad man. Here’s the link to the book on Amazon’, even though I never said a word to you before this, and when I check your Twitter page I see you sent the same message to 56 other people in the last 34 minutes. ‘Hope you buy my book!’. Not gonna happen. Unfollow.
6. I love when people RT my posts and my blog posts, and ask questions, comment, act silly, and just friendly. There is nothing cooler than people responding, playing along or just being normal. Yet, I’ve actually had people upset because I reblogged their stuff and it went out to 12,000+ Twitter followers but I didn’t say it was from them… uh, they clicked on your website, I liked your post enough to share it with 100 times the amount of people it would have normally gotten eyes on… keep complaining, sorry. I’m wrong. It won’t happen again. To your posts, trust me. For the people who reblog my stuff and love when I reblog their stuff… thank you. I like you. You get the implications of social media and the fact that I liked your post enough to want to share it with my friends. Keep writing cool posts about your writing, cool interviews, cool Metal bands, zombies, steampunk and horror stuff and I will keep promoting you, because I like it and want to spread the word about the cool kids.
7. And seven, seven for no tomorrow
8. And eight, eight, I forget what eight was for
9. But nine, nine, nine for the lost gods
10. ten, ten, ten, ten for everything, everything, everything…
Please let someone know what that last part is from… I’m begging you..
This is my tongue firmly planted in cheek (but mostly true) rant against no Twitter Respect. I’m sure I missed a few things and I hope to meet you along the journey and actually get a chance to chat with you. In 140 characters or less.
Now buy my book(s).
Like this:
Like Loading...
