Don’t get me wrong. I think Twitter can be extremely effective as a business social networking tool. Tweets that raise a thought-provoking question, point to useful information, rally for a cause or introduce a new idea or issue are all good! And it’s fine when people share interesting or funny things that happen to them throughout the day.
BUT…in the spirit of honesty, here are some tweeting practices that just drive me crazy.
1. Cold calling. True, everyone is selling something. But it’s awful when you start following someone who looks legit, but suddenly starts tweeting you incessantly to go to their site and buy whatever they are selling? Do not pass Go, go directly to Remove.
2. Shameless self-promotion. What is up with the self-important people that tweet 15 or 20 times a day to drop names about the companies that they had meetings with and tell you how busy they are. This just doesn’t impress me.
3. Four letter words and X-rated tweets. Why would anyone that uses Twitter as a business professional (unless they are in the porn industry) do this? I would love to know what drives them to this seemingly self-destructive behavior.
4. Following a gazillion people. Can a mere mortal really follow thousands of people in any meaningful way? Even with TweetDeck? I don’t think so, and probably no one else does either. It’s just a numbers game at this point.
5. Hyper tweeting. I really worry about the people that send out 20 or 30 tweets a day (except if you are an analyst being held hostage at a vendor event). Get out and run, walk the dog, go for a bike ride, play tennis, watch the birds!
Interestingly enough, these behaviors would also be aggravating in the physical world. So why would people that would never engage in them in “real life” behave this way on Twitter?
I’m sure that there are other aggravating Twitter practices that haven’t popped into my mind. Let me know what you think–what drives you crazy about the way some people use Twitter in the poll below.
Laurie McCabe's Blog 
couldn’t agree more, especially on 4 and 5. I use tweetsnooze for these two.
it may be twittersnooze
laurie,
seems like Twitter suffers from a lack of context. What separates business from casual/frivolous use of such a technology is context. I think the future would enable some sort of integration with business applications. In such cases twitter would provide a history of communication and in the context of the application and that wouldbe powerful. Visualize a project management tool that displays related communication at any given point in time of the project (rather than having to go to email and searching for related mails).
Overall, I think twitter is a feature of larger collab apps (at least where the business market is concerned)
PS – i wonder if twittering will decline as employment rises (hopefully soon)
Abhijeet
I agree to varying degrees with all but #5, but then I don’t use Twitter for business reasons, but because it’s a social media — emphasis on social. I only follow people I have some interest in, and have enjoyed many brief Twitter conversations with many people. They reply, I reply, they reply…and I suppose it could be considered “hyper-tweeting” if in the course of a day I converse with a few people, throw up a few links to articles I found worthy, and a couple of more to share my own doings.
For me and probably many other people, the value and fun in social media is not that it’s a business tool, but a community. That others see it only in the context of business would seem to defeat the term “social media”.
As for #3, it depends. If it were the majority of someone’s tweets then yes, it would grow tiresome, but I think of Twitter as a running conversation and IRL people swear occasionally.
What bothers me most is tweets not worth talking about. I don’t use it to find out when people I don’t know are going to bed or doing the dishes.
i get your point abt sales. self promoting gets on my nerves some, but if u live by orange county, ca, u sorta get used 2 it. mega follows make me nervous, but i get less response sometimes from small accts. what bothers me abt mega follows is that they may be gearing up 4 a dm ad campaign. but it wont show in my sms at this point. i can handle a little street culture on twitter. i dish it out so i’d better, but u have the right 2 turn your acct. into a church sanctuary if u want to. i unfollow when ppl get too randy though.
i think i disagree on the 20 tweets a day thing. i think that even if i didnt wanna know them in real life i might wanna know what makes them who they are. but one of the main reasons im here is curiosity, right? yours may be to augment lifelong relationships, and nothing else really making sense to you. lucky you. its your life & time. enjoy it all u can. but i hope u take the opportunity to meet as many of the alleged 8 million ppl on twitter as u can.
You missed a few. My beefs include the Tweeters who have auto-message display of every song they are streaming on the web. I don’t care if you have the bad taste to listen to Journey, but I need to know about it ?
And then there’s the #followfriday diarrhea messages. Lists of names like a phone book, without a reason as to why they are follow-worthy. Completely useless and just plain annoying.