7 Things That Discourage Twitter Followers

It takes hard work to build a good followership on Twitter. If so, it is extremely important to jealously guard your followers as much as you can. Your entire Twitter marketing plan will be much more impactful if you have enough loyal Twitter followers.

Unfortunately, many Twitter users obliviously inculcate habits that discourage their Twitter followers. Ignorance of little Twitter etiquettes as well as negligence of important social networking skills usually leads to continual loss of followers on Twitter.

Let's examine a few practices that may be discouraging your Twitter followers:

1. Inadequate Profile

Just consider what you naturally do when you meet a new person. You want to know him or her and what the person does for a living before becoming a friend. In the same vein, you will be discouraging your Twitter followers if you don't give a brief introduction and publicly declare who you are by adding your photograph or your business logo.

2. Advertising on Your Profile

Another way you can discourage your Twitter followers is by advertising your services or products on your profile. Always bear in mind that social network audiences don't like to be sold to; what they want is helpful information. So, on your profile, you need to appear like someone who can provide helpful information without selling hard.

3. Following People Unrelated to You

When you follow people that do not know you or are unrelated to your niche, you risk not having them follow you back or losing them after a while. Oftentimes, when a person can clearly say why you are following him or her, the person will likely follow you back. Conversely, if the person does not understand why you should follow him or her, the person will likely ‘unfollow’ you.

4. Overuse of Automation

If you intend to use Twitter as part of your major business marketing tool, avoid automating all your tweets. It discourages your Twitter followers in that it clearly shows you are not available to reply their tweets, read their replies, see their retweets and so on.

5. Odd Twitter Stream

You have to seriously guard against having imbalance in the ratio of your retweets, replies, and actual tweets. Normally, they should spread evenly with the actual tweets taking a slightly higher percentage. The others indicate that you are a participant and not just an onlooker on Twitter.

6. Hard Selling on Twitter

Your Twitter followers will also be discouraged if you consistently advertise a particular product or service without adding any real value to their timeline. When you appear to be focusing on what you want alone, and not what your followers want, you risk losing some of your most loyal followers (who like to read everything you post).

7. Bombarding Your Followers with Too Many Tweets

Everyone wants a decent timeline where they can easily look through the different tweets from people they are following. If you consistently send dozens of tweets which disrupt their decent timeline, it is very wise for them to stop following you. Instead, you should spread out your tweets evenly over hours.

Finally, the secret of using Twitter successfully is adding value. It does not make any sense for people to follow or continue following you on Twitter unless you are adding value to them.