It is estimated that about a third of the active global internet population now has a Twitter account. That’s over half a billion users worldwide. There are so many reasons for why mankind’s love of Twitter shows no sign of slowing down. We love Tweeting our friends, networking and getting breaking news, to mention nothing of the links to interesting articles and amusing quotes.
However as with anything in life Twitter can be annoying and anyone who uses the social media platform probably feels the same. In this post I will be discussing four of my personal Twitter annoyances.
#TeamFollowBack – Anyone who is familiar with Twitter will be aware of the scourge that is Team Follow Back. It has been embraced by those solely interested in building their numbers of Twitter Followers for no other reason than to have lots of Followers. Team Follow Back advocates do not as a rule interact with people other than through impersonal group messages such as the aptly named ‘Lazy Shout Out’. Team Follow Back is to many nothing but a infantile and futile exercise, which only gets one non-target Followers, who have no interest in what you have to say and vice versa.
TrueTwit Validation – This is when you Follow a Twitter account and get a message back asking you to prove that you are not a robot by going to a TrueTwit Validation service and typing alpha numerical codes in a field (see below). To start a relationship from a position of distrust is evidently a bad starting point. If you begun a friendly conversation with someone in your coffee shop queue, who clasped their handbag tightly to their body, as if you were going to steal it, you would probably not appreciate it and the same goes for Twitter. Perhaps it is just me but I find filling out the TrueTwit validation fields extremely taxing and it often takes numerous attempts, as they are extremely difficult to read in many instances. By the time I have attempted this several times and failed my relationship with the given person is already somewhat fraught.
Endless RTing – RTs’ are a fantastic way of forwarding information that we are interested in or amuses us, in addition to supporting other people. However as with everything in life moderation is the key not excess. Someone who only RTs’ can be perceived as idle as they never produce their own content. And then there’s the voluminous RT’er. One author I came across on Twitter had RT’d 120 instances of other authors’ books in their genre, in just one day. Finally there are the lists. What is the point I ask myself in RT’ing lists of Twitter accounts which end up going round in circles. Not much I would argue.
Bieber – Bieber has been described as being like marmite, you either love or hate him. There is no doubting however that Bieber is a true Twitter superpower. He has over 37 million Followers (known as True Beliebers) and at any one time around 3% Twitter’s traffic is dedicated to Bieber. Bieber is estimated to gain approximately 11,000 new Followers every day. Even the Bubonic Plague didn’t spread this fast.
‘I close my eyes and I can see a better day’, these are Bieber’s words not mine. They are from his song Pray. And in this one instance I have to agree with Bieber. For when I close my eyes I can see a time in the near future when Bieber is in terminal Twitter decline. A result in part because of his controversial recent behaviour, including allegedly smoking cannabis, bursts of rage at reporters, turning up very late to his own concerts and perhaps most pertinently the ill-judged comment he left in the Ann Frank visitors book during his recent trip to Amsterdam.
Perhaps you have Twitter annoyances that I have not listed.