Dear Fellow Tweeters

Dear Fellow Tweeters,

For the love of God, please stop using your personal Twitter account(s) as vehicles to spam for businesses. Yeah, free MacBook Pros and iPod Touches are really appealing and everyone wants one. And okay, (most of) the tweets for the Moonfruit (#moonfruit) competition were creative and amusing. But the Moonfruit competition was just one of the many, many ones businesses are running on Twitter, and it’s getting really tiring to read my Twitter updates page and see tens of hundreds of the same @replies and #hashtags with nothing personal or interesting in the tweet.

@sensatlandsend said it best in one of her tweets:

This trend of regular people voluntarily using their Twitter accounts to spam for businesses is wrong in so many ways. [source]

I know I can always just unfollow those who use their Twitter accounts to spam on behalf of companies. But everyone I follow on Twitter I “know” in one way or another, whether it be through various online communities or friends I’ve made through this blog. I don’t want to unfollow friends because I do care and am interested in their non-spam tweets. It just makes me sad that even though people hate spam (who doesn’t?) they’re still willing to unwittingly spam for companies. Just because it’s people and not spambots doesn’t mean it isn’t any less spammy.

And don’t even get me started on the Namecheap trivia contests and all of the pointless drama it ensues every time a contest rolls around. (My hatred of those deserves its own entry, to be honest.)

P.S. Twitter is also not an IM client – no one cares to read loads of tweets between two people about a subject no one cares about. I’d complain about this more as it irritates me as much as the whole tweeting for businesses topic does, but Melissa already covered this in “5 Ways to Fail at Twitter.”

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.