Small Business Today Magazine JUN 2014 MASTERWORD SERVICES INC | Page 30

EDITORIALFEATURE How to Lose a Follower in 7 Ways By Aimee Woodall T he other day, a friend relayed a rather hilarious anecdote about a Twitter account they’d recently unfollowed. “Every tweet,” she laughed, “was punctuated with seven to ten exclamation marks - Every single tweet!!!!!!!!!!” While we chuckled about why anyone would want to waste 10 of their allotted 140 characters, I began to think — what makes someone tick? What makes someone click the “Unfollow” button on a person’s profile? What are the underlying reasons behind a decision that is usually made instantaneously? If you’ve ever wondered something along those lines, you’re in luck. Without further adieu, here are the seven ways you can lose a Twitter follower — and what you can do to prevent it. 1.  Your Twitter feed is a repost after repost after repost. Whether you’ve set up your Twitter account to automatically tweet your Facebook posts, or you share every single one of your Instagram photos to your Twitter feed — DON’T DO IT. It’s lazy and sloppy — and chances are your message is getting truncated (or worse, lost) beyond the point of recognition or clarity. You have 140 chara