This list is from some of the more intriguing ways I have personally seen people use Twitter.

Whether it’s via the iPhone, an Android device, or someone sitting in front of their laptop or iPad, tweeting your thoughts in real time in less than 140 characters can become a way to communicate with the masses. It can also become a way to just simply piss off the masses (ie: followers) a lot quicker.

1. The only thing you do is RT (re-tweet)

There are times that you find something so interesting that you have to reshare it with your followers. That is usually done with giving some attribution to the original publisher of the interesting link. The bad thing is that more often than not, the people you follow post more interesting items than you. No big deal, you just click re-tweet and off you go. Or do you?

Now this is probably the number one item that everyone abuses. The power of the RT. It’s also like the number one item that is ignored or sent to the Twitter Dev >> Null file rather quickly. It can also have you dropped rather quickly from being a followed person. You can lose much of your Twitter power as a known RT’er – or – you can become known as just another bot spammer type of tweeter.

Being an actual person, you probably do not want to be known as a bot or spammer.

Instead of constantly RT’ing, maybe you should do a /cc or /via at the end of the tweet to give credit to the original tweeter of the link, or the item. This is one small fix or change to my tweeting habits I started doing when I found my twitter account overloaded with RT’s. That is one way to make sure you don’t become a RT’er all the time – monitor your own twitter stream from time to time!

We are all guilty of doing this, so don’t feel bad that you violated this #1 item!

2. Never engaging your followers when they @ or DM you

This is probably the worst thing you can do. I don’t care if you are a celebrity or have a pseudo tweeter running your tweets, you should somehow respond to your @ or DM items. People like QuestLove who I happened to run into one time in NYC in an elevator, are for real people that take the time to tweet and engage their audience.

Not saying that you must respond to every @ or DM, but you should try to respond to the ones that touch you directly. If you are a celebrity, you should make your fans feel like you are in touch and not above them. Even if you are a pseudo internet famous celeb, you should try to reach out and connect more often than not.

This is probably close to ranking up there with the RT’er only tweeter. That is why this has to be the #2 item on the list of 3 ways to piss off your Twitter followers. Don’t engage? Expect to start in that long downward spiral of losing your fans.

3. Being an affiliate who uses Twitter to spam affiliate links only

If you are an affiliate and you want to use your twitter account to spam with, you should probably go out and sign up for a separate account just for that purpose. Using your personal Twitter account for only affiliate links will have you marked as an affiliate spammer. Your links and your thoughts will be ignored, and most likely your followers are only other affiliates or even worse, bots.

Remember, bots don’t click links, and bots don’t buy your promoted products. Also in that same thought process, most affiliates don’t click other affiliate links. They are usually all self consumed on their own products they are pushing. More than likely being an affiliate on Twitter is not quite as easy you think it is. If you are an affiliate, maybe you should stick to mass e-mail campaigns vs mass tweet campaigns?

Technically Speaking, those are the 3 proven ways to lose or piss off your Twitter followers. There are more, but these 3 happen to sit at the top of my thought list this morning. If you have more to contribute, please leave it in the comments and share them with the other readers of this blog post.

Related articles

• 10 Quick Bits about Twitter (toddlyden.com)
• 5 Awesome Things You Should Tweet (bloggingot.com)
• Building a Community – Recap from BlueGlassFL (searchenginepeople.com)
• How To Search For Twitter Users by Location, Bio and Tweets (blazingminds.co.uk)
• Retweet : Is it a measure of trust? (globalthoughtz.com)

MyContextualAds has an easy way for you to add a few bucks to your paypal account with their “Twist & Tweet” contest. You just have to tweet like I did here and here.

To participate in this contest, all you need to do is include the #mycontextualads tag in any tweet on Twitter. You can be creative with your tweet or re-tweet our message, it’s entirely upto you!
Don’t forget to follow @mycontextualads to find out if you’ve won!

You can tweet #mycontextualads as often as you like. Each of these tweets will be eligible and the winners chosen will be the top four highest tweeters! It’s as simple as that!

But please, no bots or automated scripts please! This is purely meant for fun and lets keep it that way!

Rules:
1. This competition is offered by Zytes Technologies Inc. (“Zytes”) and is open to anyone with a Twitter account who is at least 16 years of age. Employees and agents of Zytes and/or its affiliated companies and family members of such employees are not eligible to enter.
2. The competition starts on Dec 22nd 2009 and will continue till February 14th 2010
3. To enter the competition you must send out a tweet from your own Twitter account and include “#mycontextualads” in your message. The rest of the message is up to you, and you are welcome to retweet our competition tweet URL. Or just say whatever you feel like. And you don’t have to be a user of MyContextualAds to enter, so no purchase is required.
4. You can tweet as many times as you like (though entries using automated tweets will be disqualified).
5. Winners will be chosen at the end of the contest. Winners will be announced after the close of the contest from the MyContextualAds Twitter account and official blog.
6. 4 grand prizes will be available, one each for US $25
7. The prize money would be sent to the winner’s PayPal account – no other payment mechanisms would be entertained
8. Entrants’ personal details will be used by Zytes strictly in accordance with Zytes’s privacy policy.
9. Neither Zytes nor its affiliated companies shall have any liability for (i) any technical failures of any kind, including but not limited to malfunctions, interruptions or disconnections in phone lines or network hardware or software; (ii) technical or human error which may occur in the administration of the competition; (iii) any malfunction of or damage to the prizes; or (iv) any restrictions or delays imposed by any customs authorities or any import or other taxes of any kind imposed by any taxation authority in respect of the prizes.

Technically Speaking, it’s Friday, why not?