Let’s dive straight into this run-down of the fruitless crap that happens within the Twittersphere…

1. People tagging you and publicly thanking you for following them

Usually automated, but really — what’s the point of it?

It clogs up the newsfeed, which is already festooned with a multitude of other automated messages.

This tactic doesn’t achieve anything for anyone.

I’m not one of your ‘best’ followers either.

Just stop it.

2. People publicly thanking you for following them - and they’re not even tagging you!?

Even worse. What’s going on here?

Bonus douchebag points for declaring you're a ‘marketing influencer’. A marketing influencer who can't even tag people into a Tweet. Good one.

3. Auto-published public declarations of how many followers, Tweets etc your account has amassed over the last week/month

This is the kind of data which should sit in the back end of your account, for your eyes only. It’s meaningless to anyone else. Noone cares how popular you are. If anything, it can show how ineffective your account is:

9 people followed you, 10 people unfollowed you…

That’s a result of -1 followers  - why would you want to broadcast that to the whole Twitter population?

4. Receiving an auto-DM when you follow someone

Hands up; being a novice Twitterer back in 2016, I set one of these up, simply linking back to my site - in case anyone was interested.

They weren’t.

And I quickly found I wasn’t interested in anyone’s auto-DMs either, all of which nagged me to connect to them there, or visit their site here…

A Twitter newsfeed is enough to contend with when it comes to the mental effort required in filtering out the valuable stuff, thanks all the same.

5. Tweets about how your article’s made someone’s ‘digital newspaper’

I’ve never understood what the point of these are. Genuine newspapers are in decline out there in the 'live action' world, so this particular content marketing tactic just appears more and more dated to me.

This is from the other week:

Don't know if the poster noticed, but it's 2018, not 2016.

These virtual ball pits of content are often full of random things which don’t hang together very well. Split into categories or not, my social media article next to one about ‘falls in house prices’, or some high-profile suit’s misadventure, isn’t helpful or user-friendly for anyone.

And, when you think about it, those people making a half-arsed attempt at content curation are basically pinching your work and republishing it under their own name/brand without any kind of permission sought from you to do so. The first you hear about it is when, out of faux courtesy, you’re tagged in a post - just like the one above.

It may as well say :

Tweet tweet.

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