Since the advent of Twitter, and more recently, Qwitter, we have all been able to feed the strange compulsion to know our popularity. The race to see who can gain more followers has consumed some Twitter users far beyond what is considered healthy. And Qwitter makes it worse. Now we even know when people un-follow us, and what tweet caused them to take such action.

We’ve all read about strategies to get more followers on Twitter, but what about those that get you un-followed?

So if you’re brave (or stupid) enough, why not try it.

1. Tweet about how many followers you have

No matter how excited you are that you just got to 300 followers, nobody else gives a damn.

It simply fuels our sick human need to break a brother down by un-following someone when he crows about his achievements.

“Oh, really? You have 300 followers? No you don’t, you have 299! Ha!”

Even worse, is pleading with your current followers to re-tweet your tweet to reach that 300, 800 etc milestone.

2. Repeatedly retweet a person with the same followers as you

We heard it the first time. There’s nothing more annoying than reading the same thing twice, apart from maybe those delightful souls who retweet themselves – that’s rather annoying.

3. ‘@’ someone to tell them you’ve sent them an email or DM

The great thing about email is that it lets you know when ‘you’ve got mail’ and if you’ve enabled alerts, it also tells you when you have a DM. You don’t need to ‘@’ someone to notify them. Not only does it make the recipient feel patronised, but it makes the rest of us feel left out. What are you guys talking about that is so private you can’t discuss it in public?

4. Tweeting something and passing it off as your own

It’s called plagiarism – the ultimate sin and it tells me that you’re not thinking. Copying and pasting someone else’s smart or witty comment and leaving out the RT or ‘via’ is a quick way to lose credibility. Need I say more?

5. Tweet & retweet links with no context

Clicking on links in Twitter is great. You can see what others are interested in and you can learn from them, but no matter how useful your links are, if you constantly tweet things like, “This is interesting: http://tiny.cc/cq9pf", with no indication of what it’s about, you will eventually get dropped.

You have about 80 characters left – at least give us a clue!

6. Spam people daily asking them to Digg your latest blog post

If the content is good, we’ll Digg it. You sound needy & desperate. Please stop.

7. Write long essays that span over three or more tweets

140 characters. It’s a limit, not a guideline. We’ve all struggled to keep our posts in this range, but we manage, why can’t you? Users hate clicking further, say what you need to in 140 characters.

8. Tweet more than 50 times a day

I don’t know about you, but it frustrates the hell out of me when I grab a few minutes to check my Twitter stream, only to find that someone has filled up the first two screens. It doesn’t matter how much I like you or how valuable the content, when you are so prolific that I can draw your profile pic from memory, my mouse starts moving toward the ‘Un-follow’ button. Unless you are live and tweeting at an event, space your tweets out!

9. Tweet only the song you are listening to

We can’t hear your music so we don’t care what you’re listening to. It’s as simple as that.

10. Endless private conversations

Anything more than 4 tweets needs to be taken offline. If you have a heap of information and want to chat to someone at length, make a phone call or send an email. I’ll have read something that has not given any insight on a relevant subject or topic and you basically wasted nearly ten minutes of my time.

And on that bombshell…

Can you imagine someone who tweets 200 times a day, asking for Digg love, in a series of “continued…” tweets with unexplained links? That person would be dropped like a bad habit before you could tweet, “RT: @me @you Hey, I’ve sent you a DM telling you what song I’m listening to & guess what? I have 400 followers, oh no, make that 399, 298…”

What have you done in the past to lose your followers?

Co-Author – Heidi Schneigansz