How (Not) to Lose Your Followers

While social media is definitely a valuable tool in both public relations and personal networking, it is fun to poke fun at ourselves and the ridiculous things that can happen when social media gets into the wrong hands. I found this blog post humorous and thought I would pass it along.

Twitter: "How to Lose 10,000 Followers in 1 Day":

1. Ridicule your followers openly.
2. Send creepy & stalkerish messages to celebrities.
3. Send death messages to any politician, celebrity, CEO (and basically anyone else on Twitter).
4. Make all of your Tweets into spam messages.
5. Pick your favorite power tweeters and send them endless messages about how much they suck.
6. Show absolutely no compassion for any celebrity death and instead mock their legacy.
7. Send a bomb threat to any government institution.
8. Continuously tweet offensive slurs.
9. Tweet links to obscene content.
10. Tweet "suspend my account" to @Twitter hourly.

Though this was meant to be funny, on a more serious note, it serves as a good reminder to always keep in mind one's audience and one's goals when engaging in social networking. It is certainly a challenge to keep the followers we have while also working to build our followership and credibility.