Suits, Sales & Gurus, Twitter Douches
Anyone who’s been on Twitter for more than ten to fifteen minutes is aware of the spam that is thrown your way. I’ve taken the time to classify some of the different types of spammers so that you can avoid them. I know, how nice of me.
Suits
If you see someone on twitter who’s avatar shows them sportin’ a snappy suite, they are probably a douche-bag.
90% of the time, if I see someone wearing a suit, I’ll look over at their bio and they will list our their accomplishments. It usually will look like this: “I am a real estate agent, SEM professional, Ex CEO, Sailboat Owner, Harley Rider, Social Media guru, ex-heisman trophy winner, and I met President Obama”… or something along those lines.
Typically a person like this will have a Twitter feed that is full of posts, but few interactions with other Twitter users.
Like I said, this is not perfect, but so far, my rule of thumb has paid off 90% of time.
Auto DM’ers
These guys are one of the most annoying. Typically they start following you, interact a little with you, and then when you follow them back, they send you an auto-DM saying hello and asking you to fill out a survey or sign up for their newsletter.
Now, this isn’t that bad except, with the amount of Follow / DM emails that most people get from Twitter, the last one you want to get is someone pretending to be genuine with you. It’s insulting.
The Quote Spammers
These users typically mean well and I’m sure that they don’t mean to spam, and probably think that they are possibly providing amazing insight for someone that follows them.
However, when their stream looks like a daily inspiration book written written by a bot, you can pretty much assume that you won’t be seeing any value in following them.
Followergasm!
These guys are being weeded out by Twitter fairly quickly. Typically they run around posting tweets saying “click here to learn how to gain 10,000 followers!” and then send you to a fairly blank page with a video and sign up form.
The video starts –of course, it’s auto-play– and some guy dressed in a American Eagle shirt begins to make claims about earning thousands of dollars from free followers.
Real Estate Agents
You guys are the biggest offenders of the most basic principles of social networking. Now, not all of you are bad, some are awesome see: @LBCIslander.
Many of you sign in at 9 am when you get in to the office, blast out 10 – 15 tweets linking to your latest real estate listings and then sign off.
People from New Jersey
Need I say more? Thats right. I said it. Do the gold chains slow you down when you type?
How About You?
What kind of Twitter user do you dislike the most? Do you have any particular criteria for selecting who you follow back?
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Well! Thanks for stopping by! Looking forward to more conversations via Twitter / the blog.
ymbennett. i’m following you already and vice versa. i’m jason bennett’s (dare you devil) sister-in-law.
Thanks Yvette — Those kind of “personal” questions are so annoying. I just had a local (as in IRL person) that started following me recently. I try to follow all the local people that I can, and as soon as I followed back I got a silly spam message. Was sort of annoying!
What’s your Twitter username by the way?
Very good stuff. I agree with all of it. I’m also not very fond of getting added by random businesses. Example: I got a request the other day from a hotel in Hawaii. I live in Colorado, and currently unemployed thanks to the wonderful economy. I don’t think I’ll be planning a random vacation anytime soon. :)
That jersey comment was for @mdfabs ;)
Ahahahaha. People from New Jersey. +10 Awesome points to you Sam.
Mine kind of goes along with the Suits category, though I’ve seen a few that were not in suits. Anyone who’s bio I read and it makes them seem egotistical. The classic “I’m better than you are!” for example. It also occurs in their tweets. If they’re constantly bad mouthing every one they @reply to they get not only me not following them but also the good old block button.
Also people who don’t use complete words and shorten everything. It’s ok to shorten a few words if you need to make something fit, but when you have a total of 10 words in a sentence and none of them are over 5 letters because you’ve put numbers or random symbols in because you think it makes you look cool. That’s a reason I don’t look at the trending topics. They are also the ones usually spelling words incorrectly on purpose. i.e. iz instead of is. Things along that line. It’s just plain ridiculous and annoying.
That’s why I unfollowed 171 people the other day.
Oh and we can’t forget the link spammers who interact with people but also post 20 links in a hour. I unfollowed quite a few of them the other day.
I can’t think of any others at the moment.