Twitter No-No's

I have a short, negative post today, but I think it will help people get more out of Twitter and increase their follow-back potential. In no way am I a Twitter expert or a perfect Tweeter, but I see some people make glaring Twitter errors. I'm here to help.

I noticed that I have quite a few more Twitter followers than I follow back. This is not because I am a snob of any kind. I want to follow back everyone who follows me. However, when I get a follow notification I click over to the follower's profile to "meet" him or her. If I find or do NOT find the following things, I often do not follow. Understand that while most of this is personal, I see large amounts of people on Twitter complain about these very items, so they might be worth a look. They also might be worth a look if you are following three times the amount of people who are following you.

Here is a list of reasons I do not follow based on the first impression:

You don't have a description or website.
You don't have a picture or graphic of some kind.
Your picture suggests violence or pornography.
You have nothing to do with writing.

If you pass the first impression, I scroll down and read your tweets. I will not follow you if:

Every/every other tweet is a link to purchase one of your books/ebooks.
You quote often from your own material.
You only RT.
You never RT.
You list yourself as a writer but your feed is full of posts about, say, football.
You have more political tweets than writer tweets.

If you pass the "feed" test it's almost guaranteed I'll follow you. I will immediately unfollow you, however, if you DM with a "Thanks for the follow. Check out my book/blog/website at www…."

I hope I don't seem harsh, but I'm actually posting this to help Twitter newbies. Again, I am not the authority on Twitter and I'm absolutely certain I do things that annoy others and lead them to unfollow me. I just think that some writers think of Twitter as a marketing tool but it isn't unless you don't use it as a marketing tool. You know what I mean?

How about you? What makes you automatically follow/unfollow someone on Twitter?