Dear Fellow Tweeters
July 14th, 2009 | Categories: Online | 10 CommentsDear Fellow Tweeters,
For the love of God, please stop using your personal Twitter account(s) as vehicles to spam for businesses. Yeah, free MacBook Pros and iPod Touches are really appealing and everyone wants one. And okay, (most of) the tweets for the Moonfruit (#moonfruit) competition were creative and amusing. But the Moonfruit competition was just one of the many, many ones businesses are running on Twitter, and it’s getting really tiring to read my Twitter updates page and see tens of hundreds of the same @replies and #hashtags with nothing personal or interesting in the tweet.
@sensatlandsend said it best in one of her tweets:
This trend of regular people voluntarily using their Twitter accounts to spam for businesses is wrong in so many ways. [source]
I know I can always just unfollow those who use their Twitter accounts to spam on behalf of companies. But everyone I follow on Twitter I “know” in one way or another, whether it be through various online communities or friends I’ve made through this blog. I don’t want to unfollow friends because I do care and am interested in their non-spam tweets. It just makes me sad that even though people hate spam (who doesn’t?) they’re still willing to unwittingly spam for companies. Just because it’s people and not spambots doesn’t mean it isn’t any less spammy.
And don’t even get me started on the Namecheap trivia contests and all of the pointless drama it ensues every time a contest rolls around. (My hatred of those deserves its own entry, to be honest.)
P.S. Twitter is also not an IM client – no one cares to read loads of tweets between two people about a subject no one cares about. I’d complain about this more as it irritates me as much as the whole tweeting for businesses topic does, but Melissa already covered this in “5 Ways to Fail at Twitter.”
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Hi, I'm Manda. I'm a college student studying communications and languages. I like to read, shop, bake, and travel. I have a tendency to listen to my favorite songs on repeat for hours on end. Sometimes I catch myself thinking in a language other than English. 
*standing ovation*
I don’t mind the #moonfruit (and such) thing, I have participated myself, and will continue to do so if the prizes are appealing. As for the NameCheap contest, I actually find it quite entertaining, but I understand that for someone who’s not entering it can be very annoying. It always happens, you’re always going to find in Twitter something you don’t care about. And I completely agree about the conversations thing, I really need a feature that allows me to block conversations between others.
Everyday, I’m more and more tempted to delete a bunch of people I’m following, I’m closer to do it everytime they tweet.
I’m so annoyed at those tweets, too. I was even pondering quitting Twitter altogether, but then I do want to know and do care about the real tweets, so I’m torn. I don’t mind people entering contests (I’ve participated in the first (and only the first) NameCheap contest myself), but there should be some sort of filter so I’ll only have to see the non-contest, non-spammy tweets, I guess just no @replies to anyone else, only regular tweets and @replies to me. I thought it was like that for a while, because I’m only seeing the @replies to others since… well, I don’t know exactly when it started, but it wasn’t from the beginning.
Amen! All those points encompass the majority of the reasons I don’t really tweet any more!
I absolutely abhor conversations between two people on Twitter. I mean a few @replies is okay but an entire two-three hour conversation really clogs up my updates list. Twittering for business is just as annoying. I also dislike when people say “please RT.” It’s like begging and it’s pretty sad, especially when it’s discussing unimportant events.
Well said, Manda! Okay, I did participate in the NameCheap contests but I’ve never started the #moonfruit thingy and all those junk. Personally I don’t believe in winning anything via such competitions (I only did once in the NameCheap contests, while other won… 20+ times?) so I rather save my money up and buy things myself instead of spamming others with nonsense tweets. Not to mention the other nonsense tweets I fill my twitter account with daily, I became quite addicted though. ;)
…I don’t know what to say…I haven’t been on twitter in ages (which is 3 weeks, lol).
I can see how it’d get annoying, though. Kinda like the stupid Disney people’s twitters. :P
And that’s another reason I don’t use Twitter. I’ve noticed that a lot of Twitterers complain about Twitter and its various annoyances, and I’ve never found a use for it in the first place. I’d rather communicate with people in other ways than reading tidbits (most of which aren’t that interesting) they post about and throughout their day.
I am in the same boat. Everyone I follow is someone I know in some way and I feel bad to not follow them. It really is silly to use it as advertising, though. I end up not really reading a lot of twitter updates anymore because I get so frustrated.
Cheers! :) I definitely agree…I wish Twitter would extend their site a bit more with features like the ability to block certain words/hashtags, maybe “vote down” or “unlike” something, sort of related to Facebook’s “hiding” of applications and people if you don’t want to see specific updates but DO want to continue to follow them.
I think a LOT of these problems would be solved if Twitter would just incorporate a “grouping” feature for users and possibly expand their timeline to more than one column of updates. It’s why I can’t live without the TweetDeck app, as there are lots of random people I like to follow for resources but I don’t want my friends to be pushed down the timeline too quickly by them. Groups FTW!