I love social media. And I’m not saying that here with Uggs, a pumpkin spiced latte, and an overarching sense of entitlement. I’m saying that here as a 21-year-old lexophile with an unabashed love of culture. From the picture of that Dachshund humping a plate of oysters, to the video of that woman eating her own face, I tear all that shit up. Those two things don’t exist, but when they eventually do, you’ll undoubtedly hear about them in one place: Twitter.
Twitter is better than Facebook. When done right, Twitter can be a magical place of humorous cultural analysis. When done wrong, Twitter can make you want to smash your head between a toilet seat. And it is very, VERY easy to do wrong. Everyone follows that incessantly annoying person and there’s no reason that person should be you.
I like to think I’m decent at the art of the micro-rant (find out for yourself @A_Mac1992), so I’m here to tell you DO NOT:
Tweet About Coffee Every Day
OMG, you haven’t had your coffee yet? YOU ABSOLUTELY CANNOT TALK TO ANOTHER BIPEDAL MULTICELLULAR ORGANISM UNTIL YOU’VE HAD YOUR COFFEE. Which you only take black because you want bystanders to think you’re anti-establishment and that you genuinely enjoy the natural Colombian taste.
Go fuck yourself. If you really can’t conjure an early morning thought that’s not coffee-related, please do not hesitate to use the “or less” feature of your 140 characters.
#LT
Once upon a time, during a mythical era known as the mid-1990s, a marvelous new innovation spread across the World Wide Web like wildfire. The innovation allowed you to publish every mundane thought that rolled through your head without a word limit. It was called a weblog, but the world now knows it as a blog. If whatever’s on your goddamn mind happens to exceed 140 characters, that’s the wonderland for you to frolic in. If you forgot to mention something else in your previous tweet, let it go, man. It’ll be alright.
Use Incoherently Long Hashtags
I’m swallowing my own pride saying this because I hate hashtags altogether. I try to use them as litte as possible because they detract from a tweet’s humor and are a means of self-branding. But hashtags are responsible for Twitter’s success, so I’m not completely unsympathetic to the lust for experimentation as long as it is kept within reason. #threewordstops is a reasonable rule of thumb to follow and if the three words look like a word salad then #CapitalizeThatShit.
Worry About Your Following-Followers Ratio
I understand the main reason we do anything online is to possibly heighten our popularity. That guy was the one with that hottie in that one picture at that bar? Damn, the dude pulls. This is our blind concept of status in the 21st century and I find it morbidly sad. I swear on my pinky toes I heard a girl in the library talking shit to her friend because she had a 1:3 following-followers ratio. Using that as an insult ironically makes you look like an absolute moron. There are hilarious actors and comedians who will never follow you back, so you’re missing out if that’s why you refuse to follow them.
Use Too Many Emojis
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a massive fan of the smiling pile of shit. I iMessage that doo-doo on a regular basis. But as with #threewordstops, I believe in three emojis (tops) per 140 mundane characters. The worst are the people who quote a tweet and tack on 15 laughing/crying smiley faces to the end of it. We got the message after the 7th one. You know who you are.
Retweet A Million Things At Once
Retweeting is every slacker’s wet dream. Someone posts something hilarious and you get to bogart it and pass it on with your name attached. That’s the selfish half of retweeting’s dual nature, the other half being that it attracts the creator followers. The clever guy and the lazy prick both receive recognition. Everyone’s happy. But again, this list is about excess, and Internet excessive is much worse than real-life excessive. Constant retweeting makes you lose your voice, which is any Twitter handle’s most valuable asset. Unless your voice is remarkably irritating. If that’s the case, retweeting might be your best strategy.
Tweet Pictures of Food
Don’t. Please. No. Stop. Just stop. Can you please stop?
A-Mac is a regular columnist for BroBible.
[Photo: Syda Productions/Shutterstock]