I am a patient man.   I have even been occasionally marketed as, “reasonable”, although reports vary in the accuracy of such a bold statement.    I do have limits, however, as folks close to me may suggest, and I’ve identified the Top 10 Twitter Sins that should you commit them you may find me a follower no longer.

It’s nothing personal, trust; it’s simply a matter of management — I can’t possibly follow you on Twitter if you make it hard or painful for me to do so.    So here I give you:

The Top Ten Twitter Sins:

(no particular order)

1.   Over-self-promotion – Unless you are a clearly-identified business, over-promotion of yourself on Twitter is like masturbating in public.   It makes everyone uncomfortable and you’re the only one who feels good about it.    A mention here or there or touting your new blog post once or twice is fine; more than that and you need Kleenex for the cleanup.

2. Retweeting Everything – The re-tweet (RT) functionality lends a sense of community and connectivity to Twitter by showing other people some of the cool stuff you find.    This works until a person decides that everything they read is worthy of everyone else reading, which it isn’t.   It never is.    I don’t care how awesome the people are that you follow, repeating everything they say to all your followers is extremely annoying and agitating.     If we thought they were just as awesome, we’d be following them ourselves.    Don’t force us to follow by proxy because we won’t.

3.  Retweeting Instead of Replying — Hey, I get it;  you not only want to make a cute quip back to someone, but you want everyone on your list to see how clever you are, too.   And that’s fine here or there.   Doing it every time as a matter of form falls under the same umbrella as Sin #2 — if we wanted to see your repartee, we’d be following both of you.   You’re not that funny.

4.  Confusing Twitter with IM — This is a case of the right tool for the right job.    Twitter is not Instant Messaging.    IM is not Twitter.   Using Twitter to hold endless conversations with another as if it were IM causes your followers to gouge their eyes out.    “But they can’t see it when I reply, ” you say, “remember Sin #3?”    True, dear Tweep, but if I’m following BOTH of you, I can see everything passing between.    The occasional comment and snarky reply is fine — in fact, sometimes it’s great — but watching a day-long jab-fest?  No thanks.

5.  Blabbering — You know the sort, right?   The Tweep that just yaks and yaks and yaks because they are bored or they think their followers actually care that they just took a triple-S and are now sucking on a doughnut.   The rule here is minimalism, that’s why it’s limited to 140 characters — if you don’t have something interesting to say, please don’t feel the need to fill in the silence with endless tweets about the mundane.

6.  Follow-Mongering — Hey, I like followers, who doesn’t, right?   But constantly harping on how many or how few you have, or how often they reply to you, retweet you, or DM you only makes you look like a self-centered jackass.   If you’re interesting or funny or useful, you’ll be followed, and if not — you won’t!   Simple formula.   Followers gained through coercion are not quality.

7.  Tweeting the Play-by-Play — I realize that VeryImpressiveSportsTeam vs. HugeRival is a hell of a game and you wish you had an entire living room full of similarly-interested peeps to slurp nachos and cheer at every point, but the rest of us really don’t give a crap.    Want to give an update on the score or a general, overall comment?  Fine.     Going to put some indignant crap about SomePlayer and how he just got totally screwed on that play by BlindRef on Twitter?   FOUL.

8.  Confusing your Audiences — Twitter is not Facebook, nor is it Tumblr, Digg,  LinkedIn, Slashdot, IM, your blog or any other site on the Internet.   The audience you generate through Twitter is unique because the service itself generates a different type of follower than your friends/buddies/contacts on other sites.    What goes as a good status update in one place may not be great in another, so feel out your audience and give them what they enjoy, not what you are too lazy to adjust.

9.  Spoilers — If you interactively reveal the winner to SomeRealityShow, OtherBigEvent that everyone and their dog is watching, or MajorBigMovie, I will personally come over and whack you on the forehead with a tack hammer.   Not all of us watch at the same time; be courteous of those who may have DVRed it because they had to play with their kid for an evening.

10.  No Context – Tweeting or Retweeting something without context leaves your readers in the dark and confused as they search to figure out what you are even talking about.   Don’t make your tweeps work to follow you, it should be a pleasure — always enhance and improve anything you are passing on to the masses.

En Conclusion:

There’s many, many things I enjoy about Twitter — the clever folks, the funny tweets, the pictures of some guy’s wife’s cans, the poignant tweets that make me stop and think and wish I said it.    And if you are one of the folks that regularly cranks out high quality stuff like the above (especially the boobie shots), I salute you and enjoy following you terribly much.

There is, however, no need for all that great quality to be lost in the flood of crap from all the other people who doink up the network.    And some of them come out with really, really great stuff, but it’s all encased in feces and I don’t have time to sort through it all.

Keep it simple, keep it worthy, keep it relevant, keep it interesting.   Short and sweet is the mantra of Twitter and by avoiding the sins above, we’re going to have a long, long twife together.