5 reasons why I don’t follow you on Twitter

I have a fair few people following me on Twitter. It’s not as many as some Twitter users but it’s enough to make me feel a little bit special – after all I don’t know all my followers.

Because there are so many people following me I thought I should explain why I don’t neccessarily follow you back automatically.

Why I don’t follow you on Twitter

1. Your profile is incomplete. If your description empty or you haven’t listed a website then I won’t know what you do or who you are. Give me a reason to follow you and I will be more likely to say hi some time.
2. You don’t tweet (primarily) in English. I recently had some one send a tweet to me saying goodbye. He was upset that I hadn’t followed him back… But all his tweets were in Spanish – if I can’t understand you there’s no point me following you!
3. You’re a spammer. I classify Twitter spammers in a few different ways. They are:
   • people with many friends and few followers
   • people who always tweet the same link
   • people who call themselves SEO’s and have awful websites with no good content
4. It’s been 6 months since your last tweet. Why would I follow someone who doesn’t talk?
5. You’ve sent 20 tweets in the last 10 minutes. Since I like to read as many of the tweets from my friends as possible I don’t want all the other tweets drowned out by one or two people.

Why I will follow you on Twitter

Rather than be entirely negative below are the reasons I WILL follow you.

1. I know you. If I have met you in the real world I am very likely to follow you.
2. You tweet interesting things. Content is king! Tweets I like most include video games, web design and entertainment related ones.
3. You have a cool website. If I go to a new website, and it interests me, then I am quite likely to not only follow you on Twitter but to subscribe to the rss feed.
4. You @reply fun/ helpful things. I like to find out cool stuff.

So what reasons do you have for following/ not following someone on Twitter? Do any of mine sound familiar?

How was it for you? Let me know on BlueSky or Mastodon

Link to this page

Thanks for reading. I'd really appreciate it if you'd link to this page if you mention it in your newsletter or on your blog.