My Twitter Pet Peeves

By Lauren | April 22, 2014 | 0 Comment

We all have those things that just drive us a little crazy. Since I work in social media, and am therefore constantly on it, I have quite a few social media pet peeves. Maybe you won’t agree with me on the 5 I list below for Twitter, but these things sure make my skin crawl.

1. #ExtraLongHashtagsForNoReason
WHY was this ever a thing? I get people/brands are just trying to be funny but lets be honest, nine times out of ten you will end up missing a word in the long hashtag and therefore defeats the whole purpose of a hashtag. Not to mention half the time these are so difficult to read since we are used to spaces in a sentence. These just need to be retired, you only have 140 characters and do you really want to use most of them on excessively long hashtag?

2. One account, multiple languages
I understand that several companies and brands need to reach several different targets that may speak other languages than English, but is it too much to ask for these people to make separate accounts for each language? If I am an English speaking person, I really don’t want to receive every single tweet in both English and French, or vice versa. In fact, no matter how much I love a brand/company, I’ll probably end up unfollowing them because of this.

3. Please contact customer service…. NO!
I understand that simply sometimes you can’t fully answer a question in 140 characters and have to direct customers to your customer service line/email but companies that do this for every single question they receive makes it extra annoying. Why? Because if I came to your Twitter page to ask a quick question, it was probably because I didn’t want to call your customer service line and wait on hold for hours on end for a quick question. Also, by answering questions right on your Twitter feed you’ll kill two birds with one stone if someone else has the same question.

4. Automated posts 24/7
Yes some companies, people and brands don’t have time to always be posting their own things but when a Twitter account is only tweeting a series of the same content at the same time every single day, you might as well just not be on Twitter. Get personal, engage with the Twitterverse, you’re coming off as an un-humanized robot and don’t even get me started on those automated direct messages when someone follows you.

5. I’m going to follow everyone!
So the more people you follow, the more people you’ll probably get following you back BUT why follow people who are irrelevant to you? For example, if you’re a local sandwich shop located in a small-town in Ontario, why would you follow back a concrete company located in China? I wish people would understand it’s not always about the amount of followers you have but the amount of followers you have who are actually relevant/part of your target market.

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