Note: If you're a complete newbie with no experience of Twitter, I'll strongly recommend once going through the beginners' guide mentioned below.Now, it's time to move ahead and see what makes our Twitter followers vanish into thin air and that too at a breathtaking pace.
Go All Out as a Twitter Noob
This specifically applies to new overenthusiastic Twitter beginners. You heard about Twitter from a friend and straightaway created an account to give it a try. Nothing wrong with that!But, now, you are scratching your head and thinking how exactly micro-blogging works. Your Twitter profile is still incomplete and you're clueless about its correct usage. In the meantime, some of your contacts and friends have also started to follow your Twitter handle.
This is a perfect situation where your existing followers may undergo a bad experience which may persuade them to unfollow your account. At this stage, what exactly could go wrong? Well, that's what we're going to see in the following sections.
The point we're emphasizing here is to avoid going all guns blazing unless you're not familiar with Twitter usage principles. That's why I've shared the Twitter beginner guide right before this section.
Mass Auto-Tweet
Tweeting is all about talking with real people who want interaction with a human being and not a bot. You can read about automating your social media routine to get more time for other online activities. To some extent, this is right.But, fully automating the social media workflow and that too in an aggressive manner is only going to hurt your online efforts. One such automation process is putting your Twitter account in auto-tweet mode.
There are many tweet scheduling services like Twuffer that can be used for auto-tweeting. All you need to do is to select the group of links and the victims (Your followers). Create a mass auto-tweet schedule and rest assured of losing all of your followers.
A better way is to schedule a maximum of a dozen tweets at 2 hours interval across the entire day. Tweet rest of the updates on a manual basis.
Tweet About Everything Under the Sun
Now that we know mass auto-tweeting is a sin, let's see if the manual approach is free from any harmful practices or not. Whenever someone follows you on Twitter, he scans your twitter profile and creates an impression of you and your domain before pressing the follow button.For example, if someone is following me, he is expecting to get tweets related to technology and web in general me as indicated on my Twitter profile. What'll happen if I start tweeting about recipes, wildlife, mutual funds, sports, and politics too?
Naturally, sooner or later, the followers will get irritated and eventually will press the unfollow button. So, if you want to retain your followers, avoid tweeting about the things you're not expected to tweet about.
Get Involved in Twam (Twitter Spam)
One of the best ways to lose your followers is to use Twitter as a hardcore marketing tool. It's not just the tweeting of NSFW or explicit content, but the frequent posting of affiliate links of products and services too is a sure shot way to lose the followers.Occasional promotions are not going to hurt, but trying to make your Twitter account, a selling machine is only going to annoy your followers.
Create a balanced tweet stream of automated and manual updates focusing on providing valuable information to the followers instead of blindly spraying affiliate links in every second tweet.
Sell Your Twitter Account
It's against the terms and conditions if you sell your Twitter account to somebody else. Still, some adventurous account holders try to do so and pay the price for the same.If you're doing so and that too announcing it publicly to your followers, not only your account can be terminated anytime without any notice, but you may also start losing your following at a rapid pace before the termination comes into effect.
Desperate internet marketers often look to gain control of accounts having a decent following and throw purchase offers to the owner. So, beware and stay away from materializing any such deal no matter how alluring is the offer.
Create a One-Way Communication Channel
No matter which social media platform you're using, it's all about interacting with your connections through 2-way communication. This applies to Twitter as well.Communication on a micro-blogging platform is spontaneous and one needs to answer questions and queries of the followers. If you do not directly interact with them and consistently tweet your own stuff in a monotonous tone, you're going to lose your followers with the passage of time.
The more actively you converse with your Twitter followers, the more is the probability to retain existing and gain new ones.
Take Long Breaks - Frequently
Consistency is the key to a strong and a popular Twitter profile. Taking long breaks and frequently changing your tweeting time at odd hours leads to a decline in the followers' count. Create a tweet agenda and stick to it.In case, you're going to take a break, announce it to your followers in advance. Make sure you give them a rough idea about the duration of which you won't be active.
Even if you're taking care of announcing the break, frequently leaving your Twitter account on a consistent basis will dry up the number of followers in due course of time.