This is why I feel that it’s important for users to learn and understand some twitter best practices — it makes it more enjoyable to users on a personal level and helps strengthen the entire community.

This is more of a personal one, and other people probably have way more tolerance than I do, but I have had such an overwhelmingly positive experience with Twitter as a tool for community advancement, that I find using it explicitly, or talking about using it, to make money just doesn’t rub me the right way. I guess I feel that people going into it looking to gain investment, or advancement, or whatever, have completely missed the boat in terms of its usefulness.

Not to be too negative, I like the tight-knit feel that I get from the design community. One of the things that I find the most bizarre about my feelings on Twitter, is that I actually think it’s really nice to see a blog post retweeted a bunch of times by all of my twitter friends. This probably sounds really, really weird… But I thought that would drive me completely nuts, clogging up my feed with the same link, but instead it has this totally cool, positive infectious spread vibe to it.

Here’s my short list to add:
(It applies to lame marketing as well as lame tweeting in-general)
1) Its lame when I get consecutive tweets (seconds apart) that all I see on half of my status page is your avatar for the next 3 minutes.
2) Its lame when your tweets sounds robotic. I almost expect to see bias or opinion in every tweet- shows that there a real person with a personality behind it.
3) Its lame when you send an auto-response DM or @reply when its obvious that you haven’t read my bio, my tweet history or even my last tweet before you sent it.
4) Its lame when the twitter’s presence solely hides (anonymously) behind a logo and just a nickname. Most companies with presence in Twitter have known real people with real faces and real full names represented as well. (Example: Most of us know that Twitter has @ev, @al3x, and @biz)

But if you read my tweets about these products & services, you’ll see I am a loyal customer. (In other words, unfortunately I don’t need or care about the stuff YOU are selling me.)

Finding people who need what you have, and selling it to them or at least making them aware of it, is not wholly bad. But these would be welcome followers, if marketing people did a little research. For example, if I complained in a few tweets I needed invoicing software, and you discover this in a search, then you can approach me and say something like “Hey, I saw you’re having trouble. We sell software that addresses that problem, if you’re interested.” You can do this without even following them, by simply sending a message to @username. You don’t have to include the link – they will check out your bio.

Believe me, if you have a cool product someone need, and you approach them casually and make it about them, you likely wont’ offend, and if you do they will ignore it and don’t have to deal with you following them and feeling like they will be spammed now.

ONLY follow people who interest you personally – if that’s someone who needs your service, great, but know that when you do it right after they use a keyword of yours, it feels like a salesman coming to your door when you’re in a nightgown… UNWANTED!

Thanks for coming up with this idea.

I dunno, guess it just seems kind of rude that after I’ve helped you out you don’t even have the courtesy to follow.

Anyone else agree?

Auto-response with a URL. (I don’t mind the automated “Thanks for following,” it seems polite to me)

SPELLING MISTAKES!!! You’re not chatting to a friend, you’re representing your company. GRR.

@simpsonsparadox

That said, I’ve seen the flow change over time and seen new stuff as it rolls out like @reply and #hash RT’s and DM’s. I’ve also sen the tweet flow devolve into what it is now and I guess I still dig it – it’s still fun for me, and most of the things folks have mentioned don’t really bother me, yet.

I don’t have a whole lot of followers but I could see how folks would get peeved about a lot of the things mentioned above….

@chadengle – One thing I love is the ability to shoot out a poll or question and get feedback. Great research tool and if done properly, everyone gets credit, and community outweighs competition.

That means everyone has to interact though. Give and Take, give and take baby.

There are many great things about twitter…I’ll let others share.

-@AndreaNowack