You spend weeks upon weeks carefully crafting your reputation on Twitter, only to see all your efforts demolished by a single tweet. It’s an uphill battle to make yourself into who you want to be 140-characters at a time, and all it takes is a single mistake to see all of that effort crumble. Here are 7 ways to destroy your reputation on Twitter, in case you did want to take a dive.

Tweet while you’re drunk

This is almost guaranteed to destroy your reputation on Twitter, so if that’s what you’re looking to do, we suggest cracking open a cold one and tweeting away. If you tweet while you’re drunk, you’re more likely to a) make embarrassing spelling and grammar mistakes, b) get into arguments with your followers, or c) start tweeting about how much you miss your ex. None of this will help your reputation, fyi.

Use an auto-responder

Sending robotic, evergreen, generic messages to your followers using an auto-responder is one surefire way to smear your rep. If people start thinking of you as “that spam account”, they’re clearly not thinking highly of you.

Repeat your tweets

While some people can repeat tweets with success, if you do it constantly, you are almost guaranteed a drop in your Twitter cred. People don’t like seeing the same thing over and over in their timeline, especially if it’s self-serving, tweeted frequently and with no variation.

Sell, sell, sell

Using Twitter as a way to only sell something is another great way to smear your reputation. You’ll notice that people stop following you in droves as they realize that the only thing you’re contributing to their life is a headache. By refusing to add any value to your Twitter account by sharing links, your opinion, or engaging your followers, you’ll reduce your reputation in no time.

Say whatever the *#@& you want

Unless you’re a famous rapper or endearingly unhinged celebrity, you likely won’t gain any reputation points by constantly dropping the F-bomb on your followers. While most people do swear from time to time in their day-to-day lives, they don’t want to see it splashed all over their Twitter timeline. Unfiltered cursing is yet another great way to chip away at the reputation you’ve built on Twitter.

Whine about not having enough followers

Complaining is bad enough, but complaining about not having enough followers is one of the most annoying Twitter faux pas. The only people that will hear you complaining are those who are already following you – and we bet they’ll soon stop if you keep it up.

Steal other people’s tweets

Removing the “RT” from a tweet and claiming it as your own will no doubt turn off your followers. This is plagiarism rule #1 – don’t steal other people’s ideas. If you’re going around blatantly ripping off other people’s tweets and pretending they’re yours, you’ll have no problem destroying your reputation.

(Top image: holbox via Shuttetstock)