Brands - How not to behave on Twitter

I fancied a slightly different post today! I'm by no means a social media expert, but there are certain things that people do on Twitter that annoy me. It's bad enough when just regular Twitter users do really annoying things, but when it's a brand, they should really know better! So these are a few of the things that some brands do on Twitter that drive me mad.

Don't retweet every single tweet that you're tagged in

Every single tweet may be a slight exaggeration, but sometimes it does feel like it! There's nothing worse (I may be slightly exaggerating again here!) than clicking on the 'view 25 new tweets' bit and discovering that the majority, if not every single one is a retweet from the same brand. Often they're not even useful tweets they're just somebody saying something along the lines of 'I love @brand'. I don't mind brands retweeting but please only retweet the ones that might actually interest or be of use to your followers, such as a bloggers post on one of your products, or a competition that involves one or more of your products. Excessive retweets are of no value to you as a brand and will just annoy your followers.

Actually check your mentions

I guess this could kind of be the flip side of not retweeting every tweet you're mentioned in.  I know that some brands rarely retweet or acknowledge tweets that they're mentioned (including reviews of their products) but please at least make it somebody's job to regularly check tweets for genuine queries. I recently tweeted a large popular brand with a query regarding a gift voucher and I never received a response. I've been meaning to email them instead to hopefully get a response but haven't got round to finding the email address yet and it's just so much quicker and easier to tweet them isn't it?

Don't unfollow if the account doesn't follow you back

I think this one only applies to smaller brands, I'd be very disappointed if a large brand did this.  I've had a few brands do this to me and I find it hugely unprofessional and it's unlikely that I'll pay attention to a brand in the future if they have done this to me.  If you're going to do it at least give it a few days so it might not be as obvious, if by the time the person gets the notification that you've followed you've already unfollowed this does not look good.

Don't mass tweet/spam bloggers/celebrities

Again I think this one is probably for smaller brands and in particular ones that are just starting out.  I've followed new brands, either because they've followed me and I've liked the look of them or I've stumbled across them somewhere, but then have unfollowed when they've started mass tweeting people directly. I don't want to see my feed clogged up with exactly the same tweet tweeted to Lilly Pebbles, ZOE LDN, Cheryl Cole, Millie Mackintosh etc. 

Make sure you behave professionally

Some of you may know what brand I'm talking about for this one but I'm not actually going to name the brand.  Last year I unfollowed a brand on Twitter and actually decided not to buy any of their products based on couple of reasons, but mainly because of how they conducted themselves on Twitter. The brand launched a sale on their website that was so popular the site just couldn't cope with the volume of traffic. How did the brand try and deal with this? By taking to their Twitter and Facebook accounts and asking people to 'get off the website'! Yes they actually were pretty much that rude! Updates were along the lines of 'we asked you all not to go on the website all at once, please get off the website so we can fix it'. On another occasion a well-known makeup artist left the company and although I don't know the full ins and outs of what happened and who was in the wrong it was incredibly unprofessional for the brand to write a public Facebook update basically slagging off the makeup artist in question.  That was the final straw for me and I unfollowed them.

Have I missed any? What annoys you about brands (or anybody) on Twitter?

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