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The 7 Types of User You Should Unfollow on Twitter

Setting the hype aside: Twitter can let you engage concise, but meaningful interactions with almost anyone. Celebrities, world leaders and even your neighbor have learned to use Twitter, and with such a large user base your experience with the service may suffer from these seven types of time-zapping, unworthy Twitter users.

The Corporate Shrill

These worthless accounts may project a real, human voice within a large, faceless corporation, but make no mistake: These types of Tweeters are being paid to promote their company on Twitter with little to no disclosure. They use Twitter search to catch any conversation taking place about the company that pays their wages, and have no disregard for regularly disrupting a conversation just because you’ve mentioned them. Follow them once, and you’re bound to see that the friendly customer service rep has quickly turned into the boring, obvious corporate shrill.

The Lazy Internet Marketer

Gain one-thousand new Twitter followers while simultaneously losing weight, overnight! Guaranteed! Bogus claims of tricks and guides to acquire internet wealth has plagued the internet since the age of dial-up, and since Google (and the other search engines) has made incredible progress on mitigating lots of scams through intelligent algorithmic exclusions, thousands of lazy internet marketers took their ‘business’ to Twitter in 2009. Until Twitter follows Google’s no-spam route by filtering these messages and user from the fire-hose stream, users like you can simple unfollow – and in extreme cases, block – these marketers from contacting you.

The Spammer

Spam and internet marketing seemingly go hand in hand, but the root of Twitter spam is the over usage of the trending topics and retweet feature. Is it OK to retweet Bill Gates, or NASA? Sure, but think twice about relaying Robert Scoble’s views on latest techno-gadget. The same reluctance to repost should follow over to the trending topic area; some users take to combining several of the days topics into one tweet, which offers no valuable insight into the very interesting sandwich Miley Cyrus had for lunch.

The LinkBot

The only human aspect of this type of Twitter is that, at one point, a human would eventually block them.

The Black Hole of Negativity

Blogs gave uninteresting people an outlet to express their thoughts on life, the universe, and everything else. Thankfully the truly insane will never figure out how to publish a blog post, give up and continue to use MySpace. However, for those who regularly use Twitter, we are likely to see the downward spiral of negative thoughts, broken relationships and people with nothing better to do but to bring others down. Nobody needs to read about things like this on a daily basis.

The Attention Hog

Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore and Rainn Wilson. Enough said.

The News and Media

Breaking news on Twitter will always be reported first by someone who experienced the event; not a journalist/anchor who heard about it over, well.. Twitter. Media outlets such as CNN and Fox show incredibly short snippets with a URL that links to the full story, which was entirely the point of creating RSS and feedreaders, but then again you do support your favorite news source by following them on Twitter.

Bonus!

The Clueless Twitter User

QuantCast reports that in December 2009, Twitter had roughly 23.6 million unique visitors hit the home page. That’s quite a bit of traffic, and while nobody outside of Twitter, Inc. know the amount of real users, you can’t spend a few minutes browsing around someones friendlist without finding a few who have tried the service and left. Possible reasons include getting overwhelmed by the above type of users, sprinkled with the occasional passerby who just wants to check out the hype, and then leave. Fortunately the Clueless Twitter User doesn’t directly impact your stream by themselves, but overall they have possibly degraded the quality of service noticed during peak usage times. Then again, it’s safe to place all the blame on Robert Scoble.

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