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.