There are plenty of things that I love about Twitter – in fact, almost all of the freelance work I’ve gotten has been through Twitter in some way or another. But now that I’m getting a few new followers every day, certain things annoy me enough to decide to now follow back:

No bio/cryptic bio

The first thing I look at when I click on a new follower’s profile is their bio. If they look like they’re somehow related to something I’m interested in (and don’t fail in some other area), I’m likely to follow them back. If they have no bio it’s a bit harder to figure out if they’re interesting or not.

Longitude and latitude for location

The next thing I look at is location – if someone is local or from somewhere interesting, they might be worth following. If you have a bunch of numbers as your location I have no idea where the hell in the world you are, and generally don’t care enough to look it up. Sorry.

Only retweets

I think that retweeting is a fantastic idea, and have found some really interesting articles and sites through it. But if all you do is retweet links and never introduce anything of your own, it’s really hard to figure out your personality or anything about you.

In a bubble

Twitter is all about being social (for me anyway), so if all you have is post after post about your own little bubble without replying to or engaging anyone else that (to me) defeats the purpose.

Automated anything

Perhaps I’m not a unique and special snowflake, but I like to believe that I am anyway. So getting automated messages on Twitter annoys me because it makes me feel less special, less cared about and less of an individual. So your generic ‘thank you for following me, please check out my website :D’ DM doesn’t make me feel welcomed, just irritated and faceless. I (and most people, I think) check out a person’s website when deciding whether to follow them or not, so if you don’t need to make that push for attention.

Constantly mentioning follower count

I don’t want to feel like you just followed me so I’ll follow you back so you can have x number of followers. Snowflake, remember?

Protected updates

I can absolutely see why someone would want to protect their updates rather than having them all public, and have no problem with them doing so. It does make me wonder why I should follow you when I can’t see how you use Twitter though – especially when you have no bio and your location is a jumble of numbers. Give me a reason to care about you!

Ads

There’s a service or two out there that gives people money in exchange for allowing automated ads to be tweeted from their account at random intervals. Not cool. If you’re happy to inconvenience me for a few cents, why should I be following you?

It’s easy in times of economic crisis to start chopping marketing budgets, however we believe the web is a solution to survive economic hard times, not a budget item to cut. Simply put, the web is more important now than at any other time.

- www.embracetheweb.org

Embracetheweb.org seems to Bam Creative’s latest little side project, and I couldn’t agree more with its message. Having an appealing and functional website isn’t just a necessity to compete with others and cater to an internet-savvy audience – it’s an extremely cost effective choice for marketing. If you ever had any doubt about the importance of having a website, take a look at these reasons and I’ll be surprised if you’re not convinced.

Of course, if your budget doesn’t allow you to hire a web design firm to work on your project you can always consider hiring a quality freelancer such as myself ;)