5 reasons you're losing Twitter followers

At the start of 2012, few large businesses are still unsure whether they should get involved in social media. Using platforms such as Twitter to generate leads, market to a target audience and engage with customers - whether that's listening to them or responding to them as part of a customer service function - is commonplace, regardless of which industry you operate in.


However, social media on its own is no silver bullet, and if you jump on the bandwagon without a strategy, a clear goal and action plan, it can all go horribly wrong. One of the issues many companies experience is an inability to build up a strong, loyal and engaged following on Twitter. There are lots of sites allowing you to keep track of who decided to stop receiving your tweets, but why they did so is not so certain. This is a serious consideration for brands that want to use content to connect with their audience.

As an avid user of Twitter, I check the vast majority of tweets by the people and organisations I follow on my personal account. However, because my time is precious, I expect a lot from the Twitter accounts I follow. Like many other Twitter users, if I don't get what I need, unfollowing is just a click away.

Here are my top five reasons for unfollowing brands on Twitter. Hopefully it gives some companies an insight into the kinds of things they should avoid.

1. Me, me, me
I get it. You love your product/service/ideas and want to tell the whole world about it. But if you focus only on your business, people are likely to get bored very quickly. The trick is to strike the right balance. Give your followers the stuff they want for the majority of the time and they'll tolerate a bit of self-promotion even if it's not always the kind of information they're interested in.

Some experts suggest an 80/20 rule - where you only promote your own activities for 20 per cent of the time. As ever with social media, I think this split will depend on your industry and the type of business you run, but in broad terms it's a good guideline - navel gazing and self promotion should be kept in check on Twitter.

2. Bundle tweeting
This often happens when people set up their blogs or sites to send an automatic tweet whenever something new is posted. The result is that if the content manager is having a productive half an hour and sets live ten items on your business blog, all your followers will get ten consecutive tweets from your Twitter account. It clogs up their Twitter timeline and most people will just skim over it, not taking in the information, while a proportion will find it so annoying (especially if it's a regular occurrence) that they'll want to unfollow you.

For me, it draws unwelcome attention to the account and makes me reassess whether I find their updates valuable enough. Usually, unless there's something really interesting and relevant to me in the bundle, I unfollow on the spot.

3. Trick no treat
It really annoys me when I read a tweet and click on the accompanying link, only to be confronted with something very different to what I expected to find. While subscriber-only or paid-for content is annoying, my biggest bugbear is when the site you're directed to has poor content that's badly written or simply irrelevant to the tweet. Similarly, when I'm accessing links from my smartphone and I keep getting sent to a site that loads slowly or is difficult to navigate on a mobile, I'd think twice about whether it's worth continuing to follow that particular Twitter account.

4. "Breaking news" 
Twitter is obviously a great source of breaking news (as long as you verify facts elsewhere and don't just take each rumour at face value). However, whenever there's a major news event, I unfollow lots of people. Why? Because a straightforward tweet "announcing" the death of a famous person is only relevant and interesting if it's posted within the first hour or so of it breaking on Twitter. Post the same information after that and your tweet is stale, boring and irrelevant. However, if you move quickly and tweet new information about the breaking news (for example containing context, new facts or - in the case of a famous person dying - things such as "a life in pictures" or "top ten sayings by so-and-so" - your tweets are far more valuable and interesting and you're more likely to retain and attract followers.

5. Typos 
I realise this post is making me sound a bit ranty. However, I'd be lying if I said I've never unfollowed someone for repeat offences against the English language. I guess I need to give fellow Tweeters a break - we're all human and it won't surprise me if this blog post contains a typo despite being proofread by colleagues before publication. However, businesses need to take care when they tweet. Twitter may be a more informal platform than a corporate site, but the purpose remains the same: to communicate your brand messages clearly and engage with customers in a professional way. Careless mistakes might cost you followers, but more importantly, it might diminish your credibility.

This is just a snapshot of why Twitter users might choose to unfollow certain accounts. I'm sure everyone has different levels of tolerance for tweets about the weather, Foursquare check-ins or Klout updates, but the bottom line is that if you want your social media presence to work for you, you need to take care not to alienate your target audience.

What makes you reconsider following a brand or individual on Twitter?

Karen Webber

Deputy Head of News Feeds

@webber_karen