Twitter Tactics

Firstly, this isn't one of those 'how to use twitter' posts, I don't give a flying fuck about etiquette, use twitter whatever way you want to.  What I want to know is what your way is.  I noticed the other day that @LondonCityMum was whinging mentioning the fact that she was being followed by lots of designers of baby-clothes and she wasn't interested so could they politely be on their way, or words to that effect.  She also said that she'd be highly unlikely to follow anyone who said they were 'completely insane' on their bio. @Sardinetin joined in, or rather I think egged her on to reveal other keywords that would drive the usually lovely *cough, splutter* @LondonCityMum to immediately block the poor inferior tweeter.

Clearly the woman is hard to please, but she has allowed 737 people to follow her so what credentials must these fine tweeters possess?

This got me thinking, I am somewhat anally retentive about things like this, I like my numbers to match up.  At the moment they don't and it makes my neck itch when I see it.

I do generally try to follow back, if I don't then by and large, I block.  Spanish Estate Agents take note—not interested.  But every now and again someone follows you who you aren't sure about, 'I'll just wait and see what they're all about' I tell myself and routinely I go through them all via Friend or Follow and check out their latest tweets to decide whether I want to follow back, if not then they get blocked.

Very occasionally someone unfollows me - yeah I know, how very dare they!  My first response is an utterly childish one of immediately unfollowing back.  I do like to analyse these things though—why have they unfollowed me?  Quite often I don't actually even recognise the tweeter who has unfollowed, so far dos it's not someone I've ever communicated with, completely understandable.  Sometimes it's a tweeter that I do recognise and I realise that we've got nothing in common, so again a legitimate reason to unfollow.  On rare occasions it someone that I've tweeted with regularly, I've had two unfollows that I'm genuinely puzzled about, but hey if they don't want to follow me that is their prerogative and I certainly won't call them out about it.

So who do I follow?  It's probably easier to list who I don't follow or allow to follow me:

Religious Nuts
Gun-Toting Republicans
Gurus of any description
Life Coaches
Anyone who has already got over 2000 followers
Businesses who only ever tweet sales pitches
Tweeters who never have conversations—either just tweet monologues of their lives or RT's of blog posts.
Spain Based Estate Agents
Large corporate companies—although I'll make an exception for Marmite & Twiglets —what does a girl have to do to get you to follow/sponsor/send me a lifetime's supply of...
Tweeters who aren't followed by anyone I know
Celebrities - although I did once follow John Prescott—he was a crap tweeter though

Generally speaking I will follow anyone who is being followed by a tweeter I trust, especially if they are from the blogging arena or are British expats.

I've only unfollowed/blocked a few people in my time and that was because they were too political or just tweeted competitions all the time.  More recently I've unfollowed two tweeters who did nothing but put really, really crap jokes in my timeline. They didn't converse with anyone, just told really shit jokes.

So what gets up your nose, who do you block and why (no names please let's keep it general)?




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