Last week I came upon this awesome article thanks to my dear friend Dr. Q. And I couldn’t agree more with almost everything she has to say. For those of you who follow me, you know I’m a pretty heavy Twitter user. I tweet, both live and automated, throughout the day. I have met friends and readers and colleagues on Twitter. I get the latest news on Twitter. I build community on Twitter.

But there are some practices on Twitter that are just highly annoying to everyone. Below I make my own comments on a post by Emily Chand, and she is certainly of my mind in most of these issues.

1. TrueTwit is exceedingly annoying. I’m just not taking those extra steps to follow you. Not going to happen.
2. The @replies from Who.Unfollowed.Me saying “@christinerose just unfollowed me” makes me doubly glad I did. How truly pathetic. Honesty. As Emily asks, why would you want to publicly tweet that? It’s just creepy.
3. Auto DMs. EW! I must delete 50 or more a day. I don’t even read them. I just delete. Delete. Delete. Although I don’t unfollow people who send auto DMs, I know a lot of people who do.
4. Asking for follow backs aren’t terribly annoying to me, but I do mostly ignore them. If they say something about me or my work that actually shows they know who I am, then I will check out their profile and follow them.
5. Scheduling redundant posts. Certainly if you’re saying the same thing over and over again every hour, that is highly annoying. However, I do like some recurrent tweets both sending and receiving. I get hundreds of new followers everyday and I’m following nearly 10,000 people, which means I don’t see very many tweets sometimes because the feed is moving so fast (and I have other things to do).  If it’s important, tweet it once a day, every day. Then those who are following lots of people will have a better chance of seeing it. Those who have seen it before can just ignore it. That said, you can’t tweet JUST that everyday. Refer to my four-fold Twitter approach. Twitter is a marketing tool as well as a social network. Every day new people find my blog and benefit by the information herein. Perhaps one of my blog posts will help an emerging author manage their expectations, find that agent, publisher their book, steer clear of a shady publisher, etc. To me, that’s worth some repeated tweets because the bulk of them are not BUY MY BOOK tweets, they are tweets giving information helpful to others.
6. Posting Tweets to Facebook...I have mixed feelings. If you’re a heavy tweeter; i.e. more than once an hour, then it’s too much for most Facebook users. I don’t personally mind this, but I suppose it could get you hidden on Facebook pretty quickly, especially if you’re using a lot of @replies and #hashtags. Many Facebook users have no idea what those things are.
7. Indecent Language. Doesn’t bother me personally, but then I have no qualms about cussing. I normally don’t under my @christinerose account because I write for YA. But as @omgrey I do sometimes. When those words are used to insult someone else or are otherwise used in an aggressive, disrespectful manner, then it crosses the line for me.
8. Insulting other Tweeps. Really? This goes without saying, or at least it should.
9. #FF & #WW chains. I used to do this, but don’t too much anymore, just because of time constraints. Still, I appreciate when someone mentions me in theirs because I know that the intent behind it is true, and I’m grateful to my readers and followers to helping spread the word about me and my work in any way possible. When I send out #FF and #WW chains, my intent is to help promote those people, too. But as I find I’m glazing over those more and more, perhaps the better practice is to write something more like this: “Author of magnificent, dark, and romantic Gothic Fiction, @leannarenee is well worth a follow #WW (or #FF)” … instead of just a list of Twitter handles.
10. Buy my book! Buy my book! Buy my book! Agreed. If this is what 50% or more of your tweets are saying, it’s too much. Certainly your followers will want to know that you’ve written a book and where to buy it, but they don’t need that information several times an hour or even once an hour. A couple times a day at most, and that’s if you’re heavily tweeting about other things, participating in conversations, and RTing others. Again, refer to the four-fold approach.

Ultimately Twitter is a social networking community that you must participate in as a person, not solely a marketer. Twitter works best when it points people back to helpful information on your blog, and that’s where they can find out more about you and your books.

Read the original article here: “Cease and desist 10 bad Twitter practices to be stopped immediately“