There are a lot of ‘how to’ guides on how to gain followers and become more popular on Twitter. Being popular is very last century of course. In the future privacy, disconnecting and silence will become hip again.
At least, that is what some people pray for.
For those of you who get nervous of a crowd of hungry attention seekers confronting you with every update you post, or a lack of updates, here is a guide on How to Lose Followers & Alienate Friends, on Twitter:
1: no avatar Oscar Wilde said: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”. If you are still using the standard Twitter Avatar (pictured here) than you are REALLY limiting your chances of getting followers. Want to lose a few followers? Revert to standard avatar and watch them go…
2: no biography
I’m sure you think it looks all mystical and secretive to not say too much about yourself. Bravo. Unfortunately it just means I have no idea what you do and what you are about. Following you? If I need mystery in my live I will watch the X Files. Thank you.
3: ugly profile
Nothing says ‘I don’t take this seriously’ as a standard twitter account. Are you planning on seriously using Twitter? Then go and choose a different background! Really, anything except the standard background is better than the standard background!
4: not enough updates
If you don’t send out regular updates why should I keep following you? Try to at least post once every other day. It isn’t that hard and will help you get into the habit of thinking about it.
5: too many updates
Watching a ball game? At a conference? Want to share what you see? Cool. But don’t send out a tweet every 30 seconds that only interests the 10 other followers who are also at the event you are visiting. Have some consideration with people not experience the same event. To them you are just spamming. UNFOLLOW!
6: too detailed updates
Yes, I’m interested in your life. Just not every single detail. Drinking coffee? Watching TV? taking a sh*t? Great for you but please fight the urge to share it all with your 10,000 followers. Don’t bore me!
7: not interesting enough updates
Before you post ANYTHING think about this: Will this tweet Inspire, amuse or inform my followers? Is it funny, different and valuable? If the answer is yes, go ahead and publish. Otherwise, don’t bother. You have an audience of eager listeners. What would you do if you were invited to a conference and had to speak before an audience of 500 people? How many followers do you have? See what I’m getting at? Be interesting!
8: more following than followers
If you follow *many* more people than you are being followed by you look desperate. Sure, you think you are just REALLY interested. Unfortunately it doesn’t come over like that. There are lots of conflicting opinions on how many people you can follow. Is the conversation still interesting if you follow 50,000 people? I doubt it but won’t stop you (Twitter will: you can only follow 2000 people, unless they all follow you back) but I wouldn’t recommend it.
9: auto-welcome direct messages
More and more people treat the automatic Direct Message as a perfect excuse to immediately unfollow you. Want to personally welcome everybody who follows you? Then do it personally. Never automate a personal message. It is a contradictio in terminus and will only anger your potential new friends.
10: Start unfollowing yourself
This must be the best way to lose followers! It is one thing to break up with someone but unfollowing is considered the ultimate insult to some people. I recently unfollowed 350 people to get back to 150 people just so I could keep up Twitter again. The result was several really angry letters, an advertiser who pulled her ads and hundreds of Followers who noticed what I was doing and unfollowed me before I could unfollow them. Amazing! Announce in advance that you are going to unfollow and people will unfollow you just to make sure THEY are the ones breaking up.
11: NSFW Tweets
On the web anything goes, right? Wrong. A lot of your followers won’t appreciate you tweeting about sex, drugs and rock and roll. Good chance that your other followers will love you for it of course. You can’t please em all! Just be aware of it.
Remember: Anything you say and do on Twitter can, and will, be held against you in the court of public opinions.
How have you lost followers? Said anything you regretted later?
Let us know so we can learn from you…
UPDATED:
12: only mention your own content @Roy gives us number 12. So true..
13: spam your followers with Spymaster invites @lisa617 has number 13:
Several people have argued that Twitter should remove the follower counts from their user profiles. Showing that number gives it undeserved attention and stimulates people to get more and more followers instead of focusing on content and relationships.
I don’t necessarily agree but I do think this is an interesting discussion.
Of course you can’t really delete the follower count from your profile and the changes are slim that Twitter will ever do it for you. Now Christine Lu (9422 Followers) has come up with an simple and elegant trick to hide her follower count, and almost all the other info in the sidebar too.
Simply make your sidebar text color the same as your sidebar background color and everything will be unreadable. Check it out:
Having no readable text there certainly sets you apart from the rest of the pack. Unfortunately your description becomes ineligible too. The URL is still readable so you better make that as descriptive as possible if you should decide to go for this trick.
Written on 17th April 2009
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
note: CNN was the most followed account on Twitter at time of writing. Ashton Kutcher is now the most followed person on Twitter after reaching the million follower milestone first.
We recently reported on the story of Twitter’s most followed account cnnbrk (CNN Breaking News) being officially taken over by the news corporation. With the recent hullaballoo on CNN television about the race to a million followers (Ashton Kutcher who has now won) on Twitter, it was clearly an interesting fact that the account didn’t actually belong to the corporation at all but rather a London based consultant James Cox.
Today we can share the official story of the ‘acquisition’ and exactly how it all went down.
A little over two years ago, James Cox created a Twitter account (@cnnbrk) to be able to send CNN’s Breaking News RSS feed through to his mobile. A few months later, Cox received a phone call from CNN who had noticed how Cox and others had also begun to use the account. After some discussion, they both agreed to work collaboratively on the account with CNN helping promote it and Cox sharing his knowledge of Twitter and other social media applications with them.
Two years later, the account now approaching a million followers, CNN call Cox in for a chat at their head quarters in Atlanta. The agreement they arrived upon, according to CNN, means in exchange for the transferring the account over to CNN, Cox will provide consulting services to their staff.
Twitter has always made clear that buying or selling Twitter usernames is against Twitter terms and conditions, and any accounts involved would automatically be suspended. CNN and Cox have neatly managed to work around any legal turmoil by employing Cox in return and ensuring a happy end for all involved.
Written on 15th April 2009
9 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
This is uncanny.
Not minutes after we post about the most followed Twitter account (@cnnbrk) not being run by CNN, but rather a British entrepreneur James Cox – news breaks that the Twitter account has just been acquired, by CNN themselves.
We have been in touch with Cox and he has confirmed the news.
Written on 15th April 2009
8 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
**Updated**
We have just confirmed with the owner of @cnnbrk that CNN have just acquired the account. Full report to follow here.
This has been a widely known fact for some time now, however a post (recently updated) over on TechCrunch about a race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN, made me think some people have been left unaware. The fact? cnnbrk, the most followed account on Twitter is not run, controlled or owned by CNN the news organisation.
So Who?
The account is actually controlled by James Cox, a British internet consultant and as you should notice there are no links to any CNN content. Interestingly, there doesn’t seem have been a tweet for some three days now – maybe not too much breaking news?
CNN not even in the top 100
In fact CNN aren’t even on the top 100 list of most followed Twitter accounts. The highest ranking news organisation appears to be the NY Times at 11 and 582.979 followers. However, Twitter will now remove or hand over Twitter accounts that violate copyright therefore CNN should be able to snap up the name from Cox without too much hassle if they choose to. (more…)
Twitter name for the blog here that, well, sucked. Our Twitter name was @NextWebLog which made sense when we registered it, as @TheNextWeb was taken, but just didn’t feel right.
So last week I decided to contact Twitter to ask if they could, pretty please, change our Twitter name to @TheNextWeb. That account was taken but never used and didn’t have any followers either. Within 48 hours I got a reply that my wish had been granted.
Since then we have been actively using it to promote the blog and keep in touch with out readers. As The Next Web Conference is approaching (only 65 days & 85 early bird tickets left!) we want to get more feedback from readers and keep everybody up-to-date on new speakers and start-ups. The blog is important for that but Twitter seems even better.
We automatically post a link to every blogpost we publish on Twitter as an alternative to RSS. people seem to like that and are now also actively retweeting those links.
We have been very focused on getting more RSS readers and even set a goal of 10.000 readers in April. It seems however that our readers are more interested in receiving notifications of new blogposts via Twitter than via RSS. RSS certainly has its advantages but right now I’m getting more interested in Twitter. Compared to the one-way communication of RSS the two-way communication with Twitter is a lot more interesting.
If you have a brand, product or blog now it the time to get yourself a Twitter account and use it to build your audience. Could you imagine a blog without RSS? No? Within a few months you will feel the same about a blog without a Twitter Account.
As you can see in the TwitterCounter graph up here we have been steadily adding Followers for the last few weeks. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get to 10000 followers on twitter before we get to 10000 RSS subscribers…
This post is nothing special. Just a quick line to let you know there’s a rather easy way to generate a “Follow me on Twitter“-button. Browse to Twitbuttons, type in your username, hit return, and get ready for some copy/paste action.
Oh and if you’re not afraid of some healthy vanity, you can also give Boris’ Twittercounter show off-badge a shot.
Here is an interesting point by Perry Belcher. He takes a look at a few top Twitter users such as Kevin Rose and Guy Kawasaki. Kevin has 78,112 followers but only follows 121 people back. Guy has 35,263 followers and follows 31,934 people back. Perry argues that Kevin isn’t using SocialMedia but SoloMedia by ignoring 99% of his followers.
You could also argue that following 70.000 people is similar to following nobody. If you let everybody talk at you at the same time you simply aren’t hearing anybody.
So what do you think? What is the perfect Follower/Following ration? What is the maximum amount of people you could follow with Twitter still being useful? Am I a Twitter Snob? Are you a Twitter snob or a Twitter Socialist?
Last week Techcrunch reported about a possible vulnerability in Twitter which made it possible to force other people to start following you. A user named johng77536 tricked Twitter and got more than 7000 followers in one night. The hack was an obvious spam effort with only two posts in the account, both linking to a site called hotmoda.com. The account was swiftly deleted by Twitter and that seemed o be the end of it.
Now it appears that it is also possible to get more than 8000 followers in one day WITHOUT hacking Twitter. A fairly unknown blogger with Twitter username @manatee woke up on Friday morning and found 15619 follower requests waiting in her Twitter account. She accepted them all, and ended up with 8000+ followers within a few minutes. Considering she only had 5 followers the day before, this would count for a very sharp rise to fame.
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is quickly losing followers as people start to find out they have involuntarily started following her. Looking more closely at the blog and Twitter posts it could also simply be the same hacker as before who worked just a little harder on looking like a real person instead of a spammer. There is no author listed at the blog or in the Twitter account and the image of a young and beautiful blond woman could have easily been copied from somewhere.
For now @manatee IS still listed as one of the top 100 most popular people at Twitter, which is bound to attract some new followers. I have contacted Twitter and will add their official reply to this post as soon as I get it.
Written on 4th June 2009
19 COMMENTS 
Oscar Wilde said: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances”. If you are still using the standard Twitter Avatar (pictured here) than you are REALLY limiting your chances of getting followers. Want to lose a few followers? Revert to standard avatar and watch them go…
Written on 17th April 2009
This is uncanny.![[Updated] The most followed account on Twitter @cnnbrk is NOT run by CNN [Things You Should Know]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/picture-181.png "picture-181")
![[Updated] The most followed account on Twitter @cnnbrk is NOT run by CNN [Things You Should Know]](http://thenextweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/picture-193.png "picture-193")
Written on 5th January 2009
Last week 
Twitter seems to be aware of the issue but hasn’t closed the account which seems to imply that this is more likely a bug than a hack. @manatee is 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
