Now you may be reading this thinking how ridiculous that there should be rules to twitter. But think about it, twitter is social media. In a normal social situation you try and stay within general social conventions so why not make that the case on twitter?

There are a number of things that normal twitter users hate and from what I have seen it is the self appointed social media experts that are the worst offenders.

1. Ok the first thing that you should never do is have a Direct Message set up so when people follow you they get a message that is usually a bit corny and is tailored to be personalised to the entire world and some of them are way off the mark and very clearly not personalised at all. This just annoys people and I know users who see this as a cardinal sin and will make it an instant unfollow. The image below came over to me as soon as he followed me after I followed him. I am rather sceptical as to whether he actually read a single one of my tweets.

2. Make sure that you get everything that you want into the 140 allocated characters. Yes I know that there are tweet extenders that put a little URL on the end of your tweet but nobody wants to click them just to see what you have written. Twitter is a fast moving world and it is naive to think that anyone is going to click them to see an extra 10 characters. It is not very difficult to do with just a modicum of effort. I would love to show you a picture but I have unfollowed everyone who does it!

3. The worst possible faux par for me is TrueTwit validation. For those of you who have no idea what it is, here goes. Basically it is a service that auto unfollows people who don’t click the link and go and type in a stupid code. You get the message as an auto Direct Message which is bad enough. Then you are forced to go to an external website and type in the code that shows up on the screen or the person will unfollow you.

Now the kind of people that are using it are not the high profile celebrity types that you would expect. They are random people who for some reason think that it is OK to blackmail you into validating yourself before they will consider gracing you with their follow. I must admit that none of the people using it are important enough to me to want to do such a stupid thing.

The idea is that spammers dont bother filling in the validation. The major flaw here is that anyone can sign up to it and once they do sign up they never have to validate themselves. What a crazy idea, it takes a few minutes to sign up and this will stop them having to validate themselves. Great you think why don’t I just do that? Well because if you do sign up then all of the people that want to follow you will have to validate themselves as well and why would you want to put your potential new friends through such a stupid process?

Bonus. Finally, this one is not the end of the world but makes twitter a bit pointless on Fridays, you guessed it, FollowFriday. Now it is called Follow Friday for a reason, you want people to follow the people you suggest. If you suggest 30 people over multiple tweets then nobody is going to follow any of them, now I understand that a lot of people seem to use this as FlatterFriday and just tell people to follow all of the people that they want to impress. This is stupid and nobody cares if you suggest them along with numerous other people.

The trick is to suggest only a few people over the course of a day, put some thought into the people you recommend and use it as a way of helping your followers not yourself.

If there are any more things that you absolutely can’t stand then let me know in the comments.

Now we all know what QR codes are. QR stands for Quick Response, now anyone who has ever tried to use one will know that they use the term “quick” very liberally. It takes around 23 seconds from seeing a QR code to actual recognition of scan. That is a rather long time for a Quick Response. However this is not my biggest problem with QR codes, the usage of them tends to be horrendous. It is my number 1 pet hate, QR codes require an interent connection to take you to the specified URL so why would anyone ever think it is a good idea to put them on underground posters? Tube trains? That is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Now on to QR code killers. There is no such thing, why? QR codes are tiny, barely anyone uses them and they should not be seen as a standard to live up to. There have been more and more articles saying how this new system is going to take the crown from QR codes. What they fail to mention is that the crown is made of wood and who wants a wooden crown?

Whoever rules over this area of the market is basically ruling over a cult. There are very few people who use QR codes. Personally I can’t resist a QR code no matter how long it takes me to scan it but is that is rare and it only because I am a geek. I must however admit that I have never had a fantastic experience using them and I am less and less excited about it when I see one. The current crop of advertisers are ruining what has the potential to be great. Poor placement and over exaggerated expectations equal a bad user experience. Scan the QR code below!

Standard practice for QR codes

We commend these advertisers for what they do with creative usages and the initial CTR will be high but these negative experiences are killing the QR code and hindering the growth. My basic opinion is that these negative experiences make people far less likely to do it again and therefore the effectiveness decreases along with CTR until basically nobody uses them.

QR codes have potential, the readers need to be integrated into the camera app and not as a separate app, people need to know why they are using the code and also it needs to be in a great location. Baiting people in with pictures is all well and good but this has to be backed up with some serious content. The reward needs to be there and until it is QR codes will remain a fad and a gimmick.

So Facebook have over 800 million users but you can overlook that for now and focus on the far more important matter of active users. I spoke about this last week in the Google+ post and explained that is why Google+ is struggling. However this is not the case for Facebook and at the end of last week they announced that they have just passed 400 million active users PER DAY! Just sit and think about that for a few seconds, 400 million. Four…hundred…million. That is a ridiculous number of people and the reason in my opinion is extremely simple but vital to understand.

Ask yourself this. What do you do on your lunch break, on the train to work, on the bus, when you are waiting in the queue at Starbucks? I know what my answer is, Twitter and Facebook. You have nothing better to do at these times and that is where these things come in extremely useful. Mobile devices are not the future of social media they are the now they are the reason that social media exists but nobody knew it at the time. Without the mobile device there would be so many less users and far less active users.

We all know Facebook is about wasting time and we are all absolutely fantastic at it, thats why it is so useful to us at the points in the day where there is simply nothing else to do. Facebook gets the benefit far more than twitter and that is purely down to prior adoption of the platform. More people were active before the mobile revolution and that has led to the highest level of usage on mobile devices. Facebook has more than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices.

I do think however that we are becoming desensitised to the enormity of the numbers that Facebook are putting out there but we need to keep perspective that the number of daily active users eclipses the populations of the UK and USA put together. There are more active users than people who speak English as a first language. Get the drift?  All the Facebook stats are here, check them out.

You will be far more effective if you understand where your customers are, why they are there and what they are doing. Making content that fits in with their lifestyle is the key.Mobile is the future of Facebook and social media in general get on board now and know your audience, it will pay for itself.