You suck at Twitter
The Turtle March 21 2010 02:06:47 PM
I pretty strongly believe in the 80-percent rule, wherein in any given human endeavor, 80% of the people in it, suck.I don't have any reason to believe Twitter is any different. But just in case the number is lower, I know some of you dread the idea of not being in the majority, so here is...
The Giant Inflatable Beavers Guide To Sucking At Twitter
Here are some easy steps to ensure that you bore the crap out of your followers, don't attract new ones, piss people off, and junk up the system in general. Don't worry, you don't have to follow them all! Just a few, or in some cases, just one of these habits will ensure that you suck at Twitter.
1. Post only quotes or platitudes. Never post any original content of any kind, and of course never post anything out of your own brain or something that narrates your own life.
2. Make sure your Twitter feed is nothing but bit.ly links to your own blog, and make sure the Twitter post gives the reader absolutely no clue about what the blog post might cover.
3. Have at least 50% of your Twitter feed be retweets, preferably of people you don't know. Add no new comment of your own.
4. If you're a celebrity, have hundreds of thousands of followers, but follow no one. After all, Twitter is there so that your followers know about your every move, but not so that you need to bother paying attention to anyone but yourself. Even better, have a "public" feed that follows no one, and then give your celebrity friends your "secret" account and protect your updates from anyone else. If you don't do this, your fans may discover that your life isn't any more interesting than theirs, and they may realize you probably have more reason to follow them than they have to follow you.
5. If you're a company, use your Twitter account to blast your followers with mindless advertising and never, ever read your tweets. Just like celebrities, Twitter was created for you to talk, not to listen. Make sure your bot autofollows anyone who mentions your product or industry, even if your product area is general, like "food."
6. Never choose an avatar. Avatars are for suckers.
7. Never post a bio. Bios are for suckers.
8. Be sure and use the most mind-numbingly garish background and color combination you can.
9. Collect lots of followers and then never post anything other than your first post, which must read, "Just signed up for Twitter."
10. Be sure and junk up the TwitStream with really long, idiotic hashtags like #youknowyousofuckinstupidif or #youknowitstimetostopbanginthatskankwhen. This encourages your stupid friends to do the same, and keeps you all off the streets at night and limits the actual text you can fit in the tweet.
11. Become mayor of every known landmark within 500 nautical miles of your house and make sure FourSquare announces it to the world.
12. Make sure you earn the "DumbShit" badge. Without it, you are nothing.
13. Join a lot of Facebook games and be sure that your every bowel movement gets crossposted to Twitter so that we have warning if there's going to be a "gang hit" nearby and we can remind you to harvest your yams.
14. If you attend a conference, make sure you livetweet all the keynotes word-for-word and in real time, so that none of us have any reason to actually attend the conference and it will die from lack of attendance. This also will help you seem important instead of like a crude text-to-speech bot.
15. Search for common words like "cow," "sailing" and "food" and follow every person who ever mentions that word. Even better, write a bot to do it. This is a challenging and rewarding activity and will get you lots of admiring fans.
16. If you know how to spell, forget.
17. Have only one topic and tweet about it brutally often. We can't hear enough about peanut allergies, SEO and vegan living.
There you go! Just follow some of these simple steps, and you, too, can suck at Twitter!
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