The Twittersphere According to CPM & Moon

Hello friends!  You might've noticed that I fell off my blogging wagon a couple weeks ago (I have good excuses, I swear) and haven't regained posting momentum yet.  Lucky for me, two terrific Twitter friends have written a guest post and this takes up some of the slack for me.  Please meet the delightful @CoolPawMickey a.k.a. CPM and @nycmoon a.k.a. Moon.  CPM and Moon have some great Twitter tips for safety and for comfort.  This post is geared towards beginning Twitter users but I've been active there for over a year and picked up several new morsels. 

The Twittersphere According to CPM & Moon

For newbies, when you get a new follower, always look thoroughly at their page before following back.  Look at tweets going back at least 2 weeks, and then randomly check back on more tweets. Also, look through all pics. If you see anything offensive to you or anything that makes you feel at all uncomfortable, click on the silhouette icon and block them.  If you feel that blocking them is over-reacting, simply don’t follow them back.

Also, you never have to follow anyone back simply because they followed you. Even though that is why many people follow others on Twitter at all. They are just trying to up their follower numbers by serial-following people. Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to follow back unless you want to.

One type of follower to be very cautious of is when you see someone’s Twitter page who is following hundreds or thousands of tweeps, but are followed by very few like less than 5.  It looks very suspicious and it’s not a good idea to follow back. 

Other signs of a possible hacker include; 

• Someone who can’t be bothered to upload any kind of profile pic. All you can see is an egg. It doesn’t have to be your face -- @CoolPawMickey and @nycmoon both have other kinds of photos for their profiles.

• If someone DMs you and when you reply it won’t go through. An error message pops up stating something to the effect of: “You can not reply(to the DM) to accounts who do not follow you.” We recommend that you block this account immediately because this is an indication of someone who is trying to infiltrate your account to spam or virus.

It’s nice to occasionally thank your followers by promoting them. #FF (Follow Friday) groups of your followers in a tweet – maybe they don’t know each other and you think they share the same interests.  Special S/O (shout outs) are also good.

If you are included in a #FF group and there is someone else in the group you don’t like, it doesn’t do any good to bad-mouth them to the originator of the #FF tweet. Obviously, the originator has no idea of the bad vibes between you and the other tweep. The originator is only trying to do something nice by promoting you and the rest of the group. It will only reflect back on you in the Twittersphere. Keep it movin’.

Another variation on this same theme is not to write negative things about a tweep in a DM to another tweep. Don’t expect privacy on Twitter – not even in a DM. Yes, you can write an inside tweet to someone with a DM, but nothing on Twitter is completely private. Twitter is an open feed,, it’s not a good idea to write or post anything that you don’t mind being broadcast to the entire Twittersphere.

Because most tweeps do not have expectations of privacy, many prefer to be anonymous, especially those who use Twitter for socializing only. Try not to make fellow tweeps feel uncomfortable by sending DMs with multiple personal questions. Tweeps whose profile pics of their dog, cat, artwork or nature scene have these pics uploaded for a reason.

One last cautionary tale: beware of interactions on your connect feed that have nothing to do with the flow of the tweets in the conversation.  If you see serial tweets or DMs that look off or strange to you in any way, that could be a virus. It’s not a good idea to click on those, RT, fave or interact with them in any way.

Thank you, again, to CPM and Moon for these insights and suggestions and if you're on Twitter, feel free to drop them a line and let them know you've read this post...you might even want to follow them!

May your day be joyful!