We all have pet peeves when it comes to social media. After doing a bit of a quick survey on tha Twitters and Facebook, I’ve come up with a list of my (and others’) pet peeves in social media. These are mostly twitter related so please feel free to add any that I’ve left out!
1. Posting Twitter updates to LinkedIn. I have mentioned this before in a previous post. Not only does it look lazy, but if I wanted to see your Twitter updates, I’d follow you on Twitter. If I’m already following you on Twitter, I don’t need to see the same thing twice. You can post the same content, just format it appropriately for each medium. Same goes for posting your Twitter updates to Facebook, it don’t-a make-a any sense-a (my poor attempt at an Italian accent) ¿Comprende? (Yes, I know that’s Spanish)
2. Unshortened links. Save your character count by shortening your links (by using a website like bit.ly or tinyurl) It is helpful for those of us who want to share your content.
3. Tweets that are 140 characters. I know that you want to squish as much awesome info. in as possible, but leave some room for the “RT @insertyournamehere” part. You’ll see an increase in those who share your content if you leave space and then we don’t have to edit (MT) your tweets!
4. Automatic DM’s on Twitter. I have also mentioned this in a previous post. It drives me absolutely nuts. I will unfollow you if you send me a message that says “Thanks for following! Please make sure to check out my website or sign up for my mailing list.” How impersonal can you be?
5. Asking for RTs. Yes, we’ve all done it; asked for RT’s to get information out there faster. I’d say it’s OK in moderation, but if you make your content re-tweetable, then you won’t need to ask for RTs. 
6. People with inactive accounts. This one was suggested by @ldnontjobs. I find this one particularly bothersome if you’ve ever found yourself wanting a twitter handle and that person hasn’t been active since 2009. (insert loud grumble here)
7. Those with no avatar. The egg picture is old and spammy-looking. Even if you don’t want to put a picture up of yourself (although that would be nice as I’d rather put a face to a handle, rather than one of your cat), pick something so that it’s at least not the dreaded egg.
8. Asking for followers. We’ve all received a “Please follow me” tweet. You look at their feed and they’ve said that to the last 20 or so people. Stop it. It’s spammy.
9. Having an extremely large margin between your follower and following count. I’m referring specifically to organizations and those who are followed by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands and follow 27 people. You look elitist. Just sayin’.
10 a) Use weird apps in order to display/share content. I really dislike it when people/organizations use strange apps to share content. I really don’t want to have to download an app to view anything that you post. I’ll eventually stop looking at your content if it’s inaccessible.
10 b) Those who don’t respond to posts/tweets. Yes, there is a 10 a) and 10 b). But seriously, if you don’t respond to a tweet, why are you on social media? The key to social media is conversation 
Please feel free to add any other pet peeves!
We all want to be Little Miss Sunshine and not Mr. Grumpy!
Fabulous list! I had an email marketing company start following me today on Twitter. I went to their page to check them out. They have a grand total of 13 tweets — over a 9-month period — and have over 5,000 followers! Took me a minute then figured they must have purchased followers. It’s the only explanation. Their few tweets are all about their company, no interaction at all with anyone. Pathetic!
Hi Susan! Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed the post. Don’t you hate that? They’re clearly missing the point of social media – key word *social*. It’s all about the conversation! At least the people who use social media in this way seem to be in the minority!
One of my peeves is when organizations direct me to outdated content. Don’t tell me to check out your website/blog and the content has been stale for weeks. I have been guilty of #3 though. Now I keep it as brief as possible!
Thanks for reading, Adrianne! Haha, I don’t like that either! Fresh and up-to-date content is key!
You make some very good points, I especially find #4 and #10a annoying. But I have to respectfully disagree with #1. It assumes that you have the same followers on all channels, but e.g. I probably have less than a dozen Facebook friends who are also on Twitter, so if I forward Tweets to Facebook the won’t already have seen them. Vice versa, I personally don’t mind if people post the same stuff on different channels, as I’m only ever looking at one channel at a time so I very rarely see the same post twice from those people I follow on multiple channels that have linked their accounts. However, I do agree about the format being suitable for the channel, i.e. if you tweets make sense if they stand alone, by all means be my guest and post them as your Facebook status, but tweets that have been abbreviated, modified and hashtagged beyond making sense outside of Twitter should stay on Twitter. So, I guess I only disagree to an extent
Some other pet peeves of mine are:
* People who post the same content on different social media channels, even if they’ve modified it each time to fit the channel, and then have linked ALL those channels to Twitter, so that you end up with a message on Twitter about the same things 3 times in a row. Fine if it’s spread out over the day, but usually they all link to Twitter within minutes of each other.
* People who retweet stuff with links that are broken. They’ve obviously not checked the link out themselves, otherwise they would have noticed it doesn’t work. Why are they recommending it to me if they haven’t even checked it out themselves?
*Oh, and automated posts that just say e.g. “I uploaded a photo to Instagram/my Facebook album” etc. A photo of what? Give me a reason to check out your link, please!
Thanks for reading, Jenni! Yeah, totally get you. I hate seeing Facebook posts that are hashtagged and abbreviated beyond recognition. If you’re not on twitter, you won’t know what it means. I also agree with the “I’ve uploaded pictures to Facebook.” Thanks for telling me, but I’m probably not going to check unless you tell me what it is! Thanks for sharing!!
I like #10. Some people seem too cool for school and never reply to your @mentions. And you know they’re on Twitter because you see their activity on your feed.
Hi Diane! Thanks for reading! Totally agree with you! Don’t choose who you do and don’t respond to!
My social media peeves are (mostly) in advertisements where a company includes the logos for facebook, twitter, youtube etc. What is that supposed to do – advertise those media companies?
Alternatively, advertisements include the line “find us on facebook” (or something similar.)
I say – I’m not finding sh*t! Tell me where you are on Facebook!
There are so many variants on companies, whether they have various country specific pages for their international products, or there are fake FB and Twitter accounts for that company, is your address all one word or do you put hyphens or underscores between the words?
TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE!
Don’t make me do guess work and not end up finding you at all…
Delayed response as I didn’t get an alert for this comment but totally agree with you!