If there’s one pet peeve I have concerning Twitter (aside from the lack of pagination), it’s people who follow me, then unfollow once I decide to follow them back.

I’m not on Twitter to be one of your anonymous followers and boost your count, people. I think that’s a really crappy way of gaining followers and have zero problem with not only unfollowing you, but blocking you as well. I abhor that old bait and switch tactic, people.

For my personal account there, which is @Scath, I use Twitter for the following reasons:

• To stay in contact with my friends who use it
• To meet new and interesting people to ‘talk’ to, and who may become friends
• To tweet about things I find interesting, etc.
• To have some fun and to support some good causes
• And yes, to hopefully drive traffic to my various blogs and do a little marketing of my books (and those of others’!)

If you follow me, I not only won’t follow you back, but will block you if all you post are:

• Links to your nude pics or porn
• Links to how to gain 10,000 followers in 24 hrs
• Links to products you’re selling that I have zero interest in
• Nothing but political or religious stuff

I won’t return a follow, but I also won’t block you if you tweet links to things I do have some interest in. The reason I won’t follow you back is because I don’t want to have to weed through 1,400 tweets about products while trying to keep up with what’s going on with the people I follow who actually ‘talk’.

Exceptions to that are usually publishing presses or writers’ resources.

I will also unfollow and block accounts that appear to have been abandoned (i.e. haven’t had a tweet in 3 months’ time).

Now, for my business account @KatarrKanticles, I’ll usually follow those who follow it unless they appear to be ‘twammers’. I will actively search for people who read e-books to follow; after a month or so, if they haven’t followed back, I’ll unfollow them since it’s obvious they have no interest in our titles.

That account is purely for informative purposes: new releases, news pertaining to Katarr Kanticles Press and special offers. I will very seldom ‘talk’ through it.