My recent blog post on The Top 50 Tweets that Businesses Should Be Doing was quite the hit. Let’s go the other direction – what 10 tweets should businesses avoid making?

1.) Famous quotes – I say forget these – I don’t care what Frederick Douglas said. Just my personal opinion here. When I see someone’s Twitter page and it’s ten quotes in a row from Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins and yadda yadda, I throw up on myself.  If all you have to say is what other people once said…… I know tweeting famous or inspiring quotes can generate lots of retweets, and that’s a good thing – I just can’t seem to care. There are so many other ways to generate retweets that actually mean something. I still love you more than bacon if you’re a quote tweeter. OK, rant over! I expect some blowback on this, but as Humphrey Bogart once said, “Frankly my dear…..”

2.) Politics – let people get to know you, but not that much. Politics are just too divisive – you may be the nicest person in the world, but people have a hard time getting past political affiliations (if they don’t like your choice). I don’t know why it has to get so ugly, but it does. The only time it’s OK as a business to tweet politics is if it’s your job to piss off liberals or conservatives.

3.) As I mention here, you probably shouldn’t curse too much, call people names, engage in even light racism, solicit sexual partners, fence stolen goods, or talk about how your farts smell.

4.) Pictures of your kids – go any way you want on this – I generally avoid it. And not because I’m paranoid….. I just don’t do it.  My tummy just tells me it’s not right for me. Yes, I have pics of my kids on my Facebook page, but I don’t tweet them.

5.) Anything about not paying for whiter teeth. Seriously.  As Chris Brogan would say, “Don’t be that guy!”

6.) Showing disrespect and contempt for a competitor – why bother?  Just kick their ass at business and be done with them.

7.) No settling scores on Twitter. I had a t-shirt model that stiffed me for three tees. I never called her out in public. I wanted to, but didn’t. Man, I was dying to sick the crüe on her (that being my Twitter following).  It’s three tees – I just let it go.

8.) The browbeating “why did you unfollow me” Tweet. “Hey you unfollowed me, WTF?” It’s a free country, they can unfollow you if they want. I’ve had people accidentally unfollow me. I’ve had people accidentally block me. I’ve had people purposely block me.  It happens.  Twitter is HUGE – there are millions of other people waiting to connect with you. Just move on.  (Full disclosure of hypocrisy: I experiment in this area. If it’s someone that looks nice, or someone that I would not have expected to unfollow me, I will sometimes find a tweet of theirs and respond, “Oh man, I got kicked to the curb. LOL.” It turns out that sometimes people accidentally unfollow others.)

9.) Hey @so-and-so, I unfollowed you because….. There is no need for this. If you absolutely have to express yourself to the person you unfollowed, send them a direct message.  It will be hilarious, because they won’t be able to DM you back! (you cannot DM those that aren’t following you).

10.) The response tweet that expresses confusion at a tweet of yours, like “who are you and what are you responding to?” This happens to me all the time, it drives me a little nuts, and it’s happening for two reasons, I think – let me explain with pictures.

A guy asks for assistance:

A few hours later, I provide the assistance he requested, and I let him know via this tweet:

He is confused as to what my “done!” tweet means:

Expressing such confusion is avoidable. All you have to do is drill backwards from my tweet to see what it was I was responding to.  See below:

When @yogy05 goes to look at his “@” replies, he will see the tweet you see above. All he has to do is click on “in reply to yogy05” to go back to his original tweet – the one I was responding to. This will tell him what was “done.”  I think some people don’t realize that you can do this, or is it possible that one doesn’t have the ability to drill backwards when using certain smartphone Twitter clients?  Not sure, but it sometimes makes for disjointed and awkward conversations.