“He just seems like one of those people for whom Twitter is, like, the perfect medium.”

-An actual description of me, which I think was a compliment, by MC79hockey.com’s Tyler Dellow.

I like Twitter. It’s equal parts useful resource and enjoyable distraction, allowing me to stay up to date on developments in my spare time interest areas throughout the work day. I can have a discussion about the similarities between the Scrubs character “Hooch” and Bill Duke’s characters in Commando and Predator, or about which Toronto restaurants have the best scotch menus, dropping in and out of it all in a way that appeals strongly to my mid-twenties male attention span. I’ve even been contacted by someone who follows me on Twitter to recommend a particular brand of bacon, which makes me think I’m engaging with compatible people pretty effectively.

The very best thing about Twitter, though, is that you have to opt into listening to what any particular user has to say, and you can always change your mind if a person uses his feed to regularly say things you don’t want clogging up your timeline. In other online discussion venues fueled by user participation, specifically message boards, success is a tradeoff. The more popular a particular board gets, the more attractive it becomes for people who only want to promote something, instead of joining the conversation. If too many of them show up, the board loses some of its ability to facilitate discussion. If a Twitter user’s feed reaches an undesirable spam to content ratio, though, you can just stop following it, and the venue retains its usefulness.

The Twitter experience is a bit different for every user. I gravitate toward its conversational side; others prefer to use it as a more participatory alternative to a traditional RSS reader; many use it as yet another outlet for the mindless political tribalism that makes me want to stab them when they do it in person. A seemingly common feature among all these users is the desire to be heard, as evidenced by a lot of chatter over the last few days about people “begging” for followers. I’m far too much of a narcissist to take a principled stand against self-promotion, but there are good and bad ways to do it, depending on what you’re after. If you’re among the people actively seeking a larger audience, you may be interested in this handy guide I’ve put together on exactly why I, and like-minded others, are not yet in it.

Seven specific ways to chase me away from your Twitter feed:

1. Talk about wanting more followers. I decide whether to follow someone based on the recent entries in that person’s feed when I discover it. If it looks like they talk about things that interest me, I follow. Little is as uninteresting as your dissatisfaction with your current level of influence. Telling me you want me to listen does nothing for me. Instead, show me why I should want to listen.
2. Sync your Foursquare account with your Twitter account. Would arriving at your workplace at 9:00am on a weekday be something you’d feel compelled to tweet about if Foursquare didn’t do it for you? If not, why let an automated application be so boring on your behalf?
3. Take “Follow Friday” to extremes. If you’re going to use the day of the week to determine whether a feed is interesting enough to share with your followers, at least give a reason why it’s worth looking into. Otherwise it’s just a list of names. If someone created a Twitter account that just reproduced the phone book, would you follow it?
4. Do play-by-plays of sports and other easily watchable events. If I wanted to know what was happening that badly, I’d tune in. Commentary on those things is great, and one of my favourite things about Twitter, but if you have nothing to add in your own voice, you’re just making noise. If your followers are the type of people who want to know Phil Kessel was the goal scorer, they’ll already know by the time you’ve said it.
5. Fight Twitter’s insistence that you be concise. Brevity is a major component of Twitter’s value prop, which is why it  enforces a length limit on updates. If your statement doesn’t fit within it, it’s a statement for another medium. There’s nothing so horrible about the occasional multi-parter, but if you’re making consistent efforts to get around one of the specific reasons a lot of people like Twitter, you’d better have something pretty damned interesting to say if you want them to be patient enough to listen.
6. Say nothing, and say it often. You know that guy at your office who talks for hours, but never says anything of substance? If he had Twitter, would you follow him? “Woo I hope my team wins,” “Have you checked out my site lately lol,” and “I’m listening to <band> but I’m not offering any input about them or their album” are the Twitter versions of that guy. If you have nothing to add to the conversation, you have no reason to prolong it. I’m looking at you, @MapleLeafs.
7. Repeat widely reported things without adding comment. I already follow Darren Dreger. When you retweet his report of a trade, you’re not getting a scoop, you’re just doubling the clog in my timeline. If you were watching the news with someone, and he kept repeating the anchor word for word, instead of talking about what was reported, you would want to stab him. When signed into Twitter, we’re all watching the news, all the time. Act accordingly.

A little bit of any of these isn’t going to scare me off, but if they become common enough that I expect them from you, you’ve lost me. I’m not a social media expert, or knowledgeable about marketing at all, but if you’re using Twitter to promote something, I’m potentially in your audience. If I’m also in your target demo, you may want to take note of why I’m not currently listening.