I joined Twit­ter a lit­tle over two and a half years ago. I don’t need to tell you about the service’s astro­nom­i­cal growth and accep­tance into the main­stream. Fea­tures have been added to com­pli­ment how users use it. “Best prac­tices” have been formed by social media gurus, mavens, and experts. While I don’t buy into their titles, I do agree there are tweet­ing habits that annoy me.

First, I’m a huge fan of native retweets. I could tol­er­ate the chain­ing of RT after RT after RT, but the native method is so much cleaner and you don’t have to worry about edit­ing the orig­i­nal tweet to fit in all the RTs and vias. Still not every­one is on board, but my stream has def­i­nitely cleaned up and become more read­able (scan-able) since this fea­ture was imple­mented. I would include exam­ples, but I don’t want to embar­rass any­one I know or humil­i­ate a stranger from the search stream.

OLD WAY: RT @someone: RT @another: RT @secondguy this tweet will be pop­u­lar (via @firstguy)

NEW WAY: This is the orig­i­nal tweet in its entirety. The client or web page will show the orig­i­na­tor and the retweeters

Sec­ond, replies are prob­a­bly the best fea­ture and at the same time the fea­ture that users screw up the most. Reply­ing, just like retweet­ing, wasn’t an orig­i­nal fea­ture. It grew organ­i­cally from the users. It became accepted that if you began your tweet with someone’s name it was prob­a­bly in response to one of their recent tweets. These sudo-replies would show up for all of your fol­low­ers which lead to a lot of con­fu­sion because not every­one could fol­low the conversation.

Twit­ter made it so you could reply directly to a cer­tain user and their par­tic­u­lar tweet. If you reply to some­one, only peo­ple who fol­low both of you will see the reply. It cleaned up streams and made con­ver­sa­tions great.

Con­ver­sa­tion linked together with replies

It’s easy to read because the data is linked together behind the scenes. Only peo­ple who fol­low Pat and I saw the con­ver­sa­tion. There is one tiny caveat to this– you have to spell the person’s name you’re reply­ing to cor­rectly. You’d think that’d be sim­ple espe­cially since most clients pop­u­late it for you, but peo­ple and com­pa­nies like DIRECTV still mess up on a reg­u­lar basis which results in the reply be blasted to all of your followers.

CAVEAT: @JohnDoeThis reply should have just been to you and not all of our followers

Since in the past a tweet begin­ning with a user­name was con­sid­ered a reply, peo­ple started putting a period in front of a user’s name if it was at the begin­ning of a tweet. The exam­ple above proves they’re wast­ing one of their pre­cious char­ac­ters. Twit­ter is smart enough to know the dif­fer­ence and so are the devel­op­ers for 3rd party apps

GRR: .@Person is the great­est and I want to guar­an­tee that every­one knows this by start­ing this with a period.

GROOVY: @Person is great. They know it and now all of you do too even with­out a period pref­ac­ing this tweet.

My ulti­mate peeve is when peo­ple don’t under­stand the pur­pose of a retweet and a reply along with the dif­fer­ence. If you have a com­ment about someone’s tweet, reply to them and only them (plus who­ever fol­lows you both). Don’t retweet what that per­son said pref­aced with your com­ment to all of your fol­low­ers. You bet­ter be uber hilar­i­ous or a celebrity if you do. If you like what that per­son had to say, natively retweet it. That implies your sup­port of the tweet and sends it along to your fol­low­ers unal­tered as god intended.

STOP THIS: OMG SMH #stu­pid­hash­tag haha RT: @yourfriendnotmine blarghhh RT: @anotherpersonIdontknow I am silly

Reply is your friend. Reply to your friends. Your friends will see your replies if that’s why you insist on tweet­ing like this. I have to use a real exam­ple so it’s clear what I’m talk­ing about.

There is no value in this.

Thank­fully most every­one is in agree­ment that auto­mat­i­cally sent direct mes­sages are pure evil. But, I had to share this clue­less­ness by Citi from the other week.

Pro Tip: You don’t have to spec­ify who you’re talk­ing to in a DIRECT message

Absolute bril­liance from their social media expert/guru/maven.

My last peeve is actu­ally with Twitter’s new fol­lower emails. They’re pretty worth­less to me because I don’t care how many fol­low­ers some­one has or how many peo­ple they are fol­low­ing. It’s actu­ally a great indi­ca­tor of whether it’s worth look­ing at the person’s profile.

If you’re fol­low­ing 100x or 1000x the num­ber of peo­ple who fol­low you, odds are you’re not that inter­est­ing. If you have about an even ratio but are still fol­low­ing more than 5,000 peo­ple, you prob­a­bly won’t notice or care if I fol­low you back. I don’t want to judge by the num­bers, but since that’s what I see more often that someone’s pro­file, it’s all I can do.

I wish Twit­ter would send me their loca­tion, web­site, bio and maybe a few sam­ple tweets so I know what to expect as a follower.

BONUS PEEVE: Peo­ple who com­plain about not hav­ing any fol­low­ers but have a pri­vate pro­file. You will not amass fol­low­ers with a pri­vate stream so either go pub­lic or shut up :)

Don’t For­get

Use Twit­ter how­ever you want. Twit­ter only grew to what it is today because peo­ple used it how they want. Did you notice Pat’s lit­tle ‘cc @23andme’ in his tweet? That email-like inclu­sion has become more and more preva­lent (in my stream) to attract the atten­tion of oth­ers. It’s new and I like it. Just don’t mis­use and abuse it.