Are your habits holding you back from reaching your full Twitter power potential? New users and veterans alike should take a moment to check their own Twitter activity to this list of self-promotion sins. As Twitter continues to evolve as a medium for communications and marketing, so do the habits of its users and the etiquette they find acceptable. Make certain you are maximizing your effectiveness by avoiding these common pitfalls.

1. Not Speaking the language

As is the case with new technologies everywhere, Twitter has developed its own language and rules for dialogue. Newbies may be confused and attempt to speak in regular English, but this comes across as amateurish and unprofessional. On one hand, this can be as simple as familiarizing yourself with the new dictionary (and abbreviations) that avid Twitter users have created for themselves. However it’s arguably more important to understand how to interact with other users: retweeting needs to be a concept you become intimately familiar with, so does understanding the difference between a DM and an @ reply and how they are each streamed across the Twitterverse (or not).

2. Choosing a Bad Name

Let me guess: the simple, effective name you really wanted on Twitter is taken. So you substituted what you thought would be a cute, kitschy, or punny variation. If you're tweeting for primarily business or professional purposes, this simple mistake can cost you new followers. Your name needs to relate to your business, needs to reflect your brand image, and should be easy to remember.

Also, for the sake of effective retweeting, it’s important to keep your name relatively short. With only 140 characters to work with, a message a user tries to retweet can easily be eaten up by your 15-character user name.

Finally, the Social Media Examiner also suggests avoiding the use of underscores --- the "_ "character --- as they're often difficult for mobile users to type.

3. Inconsistent Branding

While the tweets you broadcast to your followers are the most important piece of the Twitter puzzle, don’t underestimate the importance of creating and maintaining your Twitter profile and page. People can navigate directly to your Twitter feed at twitter.com/yourusername. Like me, you may initially find it extremely challenging to fit your “about me” into just 140 characters; however, it is important to take the time to do so with consistency to your brand message. Don’t forget to add an image for your avatar and take advantage of the ability to “skin” your page with an appropriate background and color scheme; failure to do so may turn potential followers off thinking you are not serious or official. Check out Mashable’s list of 40 Best Twitter Brands for real life examples.

4. Being Boring

What if every time you spoke to your friend they told you about what they ate, that their subway ride was uneventful, that their cat was really enjoying the sunlight and that they were looking for a new dentist? If they never asked for your feedback or interaction? You probably would avoid conversations with that person. In the Twitter world, you’d quickly un-follow them. In fact, in a SocialMediaToday.com survey, most people who quit Twitter did so because they found they were “bored with the things people tweeted about.”

Social Media Scientist, Dan Zarrella encourages us to think of Twitter as a cocktail party, and as such you have to think about whether you are being even remotely interesting. Zarrella points out that since we are constantly bombarded by a variety of messages, you really need to be novel in order to stand out. 

5. Bragging

You’ve achieved something noteworthy and impressive, or at least you think so. You want to share this fact with your “tweeps” but you’re apprehensive about coming across as pompous and self-interested. Well, you have reason for concern. We’ve all had times where our online communications have gone tragically awry due to the fact that the medium lacks the intonation that we can express in our voices or face-to-face contact. Compress your thought into 140 characters and the chance of being misunderstood multiply tenfold. In fact, data analyzed by Dan Zarrella shows that the more you reference yourself, the fewer followers you will have. But, as this Wired article points out, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to pat yourself on the back once in a while. Just be sure it is relatively infrequent, it’s tied to someone else’s praise of you, and you add a dash of humility.

6. Bad timing

One of the greatest challenges with Twitter is the bottomless newsfeed. Tweet at the wrong moment and it gets lost in the shuffle, never to be revisited unless you are lucky enough to have followers who scan their old tweets. While it may seem obvious to tweet in the daytime hours as opposed to the middle of the night, there's more to timing than meets the eye.

Data from the Social Media guide suggests that tweeting at 12pm EST is the ideal time for reasons that include catching West Coasters arriving at work, East Coasters on lunch, and Europeans finishing their day. This coincides with Zarrella’s data showing that retweets peak in the early to mid-afternoon, retweeting being the ultimate sign of user engagement. Send that tweet first thing in the morning and you could be doing your message a disservice while the Twitter community presumably is still waking up.

7. Frequency Issues

Twitter is often described to new users as a fast-paced conversation comprised of short, concise paragraphs. And it’s best to keep this in mind when thinking about how frequently you should be tweeting. While some suggest it’s purely a “more is better” equation (the Twitter Marketing Blog provides us a calculation for how often you would need to tweet to be always on someone’s news feed), this is also a good way to annoy your followers.

But what is the sweet spot? According to a research from HubSpot you should be tweeting approximately 22 times per day for maximum stickiness, despite the fact that the average Twitter user only tweets a little over 4 times per day.

While these rules are just the beginning of creating yourself a positive Twitter community, avoid these pitfalls and you’ll be well on your way to becoming ‘twamous’.... or at least avoiding the dreaded twinfamy.