How to Lose Followers & Alienate Friends, on Twitter

Written on 4th June 2009                                                                                                              19 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

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:

14: let us know!

Avatar, followers, friends, twitter

19 Comments »

Squace unveils mobile browsing without typing

Written on 28th May 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Swedish start-up Squace has introduced a new way of browsing the internet on your mobile. They’ve developed a service that allows users to browse without typing. Instead of a list of headlines, Squace shows a grid of little squares.
Each square is linked to a Web service such as a newsfeed, web site, game or widget. When you hover over one of these squares, a pop-up revealing the connected content and share feature appears. With a click, users open a new page with the desired content. According to the founder, Aage Reerslev, it’s a “game-changer”.

He might be right. Mobile browsing isn’t easy for not so tech-savvy people and Squace has been putting quite some effort in developing a new way of intuitive browsing. The company was founded in 2006 and privately funded by more than 30 private investors. While developing the service, it was thoroughly tested. In a study by the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, participants were asked to solve 10 information-searching problems. With Squace, they did it with up to 88 percent fewer clicks in nine out of ten problems, and up to 78 percent faster in eight out of ten problems, compared with a leading carrier’s mobile Internet portal and software.

Although the statistics are impressive, I’m not totally feeling this new way of browsing yet. Especially when it comes to news, I prefer to see a list of headlines. It’s quicker for me to scroll to list like this than to hover over a dozen squares. Yet the sharing function does gets me excited. With a few clicks, my friends receive the content I want to show them. Also, I can easily bookmark interesting pages. But of all of this is only worth it if my friends join. How can I lure them into the world of Squace? Maybe they would come and check it out if I could put a widget with my shared Squace items on my blog. Solutions like these will help Squace to become viral. There’s your new top priority, Squace team.

friends, mobile, mobile browsing, share, squace

4 Comments »

Crowd Status: what’s your crowd up to?

Written on 11th April 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Everybody on the social web is always sharing what they’re up to. We’re answering the “what are you doing?” question on Twitter, telling LinkedIn connections what we’re working on or sharing some fun thoughts with Facebook friends. Sometimes we might even forget to enjoy the moment because we’re busy sharing (I always think this when I see people filming a concert with their camera phones).

So one of the consequences is the updates of the people we REALLY care about might get lost in the overabundance of status updates. I’m not only one who notices this, as there seems to be a trend going on that we want to divide our “friends” in groups. Two weeks ago I wrote about a service that tried to create groups in Twitter, yet they failed miserably. Now there’s a new tool, which makes it possible to create group pages to see what your friends, colleagues, heroes or whatever are doing. It’s called Crowd Status and developed by Darren Stuart.

My crowd, The Next Web editors, is currently concerned with the following things:

The tool is very basic now: it only works with Twitter and there are no widgets, Facebooks apps or whatsoever. Though it works fine if you just want so what a small group of selected people is doing. You could link to it from your Netvibes startpage or put public links on your blog. I’m not sure whether Stuart will develop it any further as he considers it to be a “personal project”. Yet the “definitely in Alpha” sign do gives me hope.

crowd status, darren stuart, friends, social networks, status updates, twitter

2 Comments »