As I’ve said before, the best thing about social media networks is that the user can cater the way they use it to exactly the way they want to. However, along with the power to do what you want, there are good and bad ways to use social media. Here are a few examples of Twitter faux pas and how to avoid doing the same.

#FF Follow Friday Hashtag

Follow Friday is a user-generated hashtag that has existed essentially since Twitter started. It’s an effort to suggest to your followers some new accounts to follow based on your interests. It strengthens the community and allows more potential connections to be made among like-minded people. Scott Stratten of @unmarketing is a great account to follow for best and worst Twitter practices. My absolute favorite suggestion of his is this:

When an account blasts out a #FF message looking like this:

it’s viewed as a big group of clutter, and really makes your timeline look like a mess. It’s ineffective and usually winds up making followers ignore your tweet, which is the complete opposite of what you’re trying to accomplish here.

An example of a nice #FF post is: “#FF @mashable for the best coverage of social media news.” It’s short, gives a good reason why to follow, and doesn’t have 10 links to click on.

Reply All

The Reply All button is a gift and a curse all in one. For example, if I send out a tweet that one of my followers enjoys and they decide to use the “RT @” function instead of a native retweet, my account handle will appear in their message. If one of their followers likes it and wants to reply to them, if they hit ‘reply all’, all of the handles will appear in the message box. When this happens and these accounts outside of my stream have a conversation, I may be tagged in an entirely unrelated conversation, which is incredibly frustrating.

This instance gets amplified exponentially if you have your settings for text message alerts whenever your twitter account receives an @ reply. Nobody really wants their phone buzzing out of control for conversations that don’t involve them.

Unless you really intended to include each handle in the conversation, please be sure to cater your message to your target, and remove the other handles in your tweets unless you know everyone is interested in the conversation!

Rapid Fire Tweeting

I’ve been guilty of rapid-fire tweeting myself a few times, and in some instances I find it okay from certain (comedian) accounts I follow, but it’s not advised.

The most common case of this happening is when there’s a trending topic or a hashtag your friends are trying to make catch on. It’s usually something silly like #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog. Every now and again a user will treat their Twitter feed as a stream of consciousness and tweet out every possible title that comes to name.

“The Dogfather” #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog

“Citizen Dog” #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog

“The Wizard of Dog” #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog

“Cool Dog Luke” #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog

“12 Angry Dogs” #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog

“The Dog Couple” #ReplaceAWordInMovieTitleWithDog

Sure some of these may be funny, and you’ll chuckle at the creativity of how things dog out when you actually replace a word in a movie title with the word dog, however when your feed is log-jammed by 10 tweets in a row by the same user it’s generally going to leave you feeling annoyed. “Enough is enough” or “Oh please stop already” are common phrases thrown around which unfortunately may lose you some followers when you may have a great and interesting account otherwise.

Hopefully these are constructive and make sense to you. If you notice any other quirks or annoyances on Twitter, post in the comments. Otherwise, happy tweeting!