7 Ways To Tell Whether Someone Is A Newbie On Twitter

There are obvious signs of a new driver. If the car in front of you makes a left turn with the right blinker on, stops and starts often, and is making bad turns, then you know the person behind the wheel is new to driving (I start the entire process this summer). There are also obvious signs that someone just started to use Twitter. These are seven of them:

1. The person does not have a lot of tweets. If someone has less than 1,000 tweets, then that person is definitely a newbie on Twitter. People with over 1,000 tweets, are not newbies.
2. The egg avatar. Some people have thousands of followers but still have the egg avatar. Those accounts are the exceptions, not the rule. If someone has the egg avatar, that person is probably new to Twitter. If someone has the egg avatar and has thousands of followers, then that account may be a spam account (this does not always happen, but it is common).
3. Statuses that do not flow. If you feel awkward reading most of someone’s statuses (awkward in the way that reading them sounds), then that person probably just joined Twitter. In the beginning, people experiment with tweets and have no idea what creates the perfect tweet.
4. A really bad follower to following ratio. An obvious sign of a new account is one with 100 followers that is following 1,987 people because that account currently cannot follow over 2,000 people. The people behind these accounts heard that following a lot of people to get follow backs is a great idea, but these people took it a bit too far.
5. These people only talk to celebrities. Celebrities almost never respond to other people’s tweets. If you sent a tweet to your favorite celebrity, then you know that I mean. Some people go on Twitter just to follow celebrities and hope that one day, their favorite celebrity will respond to one of their tweets. The people who are thriving on Twitter decided to go from talking to celebrities to talking with their own followers.
6. Asking for the shout out. With over 50 million followers on Twitter, Katy Perry will not be asking for a shout out anytime soon. If you are a part of the large majority, you don’t have 50 million followers. In fact, the majority of Twitter users have under 1,000 followers. These people ask for shout outs because they think that if someone with 100,000 followers gave them a shout out and they only gained 1% of those followers, that person would gain 1,000 followers. The problem is that it never happens that way. Less than 10% of those 100,000 followers will see the tweet. Then, less than 10% of those people will read the entire tweet. Then, less than 5% of the people will follow the account. Mathematically, that would still be 50 followers, but that won’t happen. Asking for and getting shout outs is the most overrated way to get more followers. Twitter users who have been tweeting for a while know that this is true.
7. Two tweets to relay 1 message. Some newbies will need more than 140 characters to relay their message. Instead of using less characters to relay the message, some newbies will send out the first tweet and then send out a second tweet which is a continuation for the first tweet. While continuations work very effectively in reality TV shows, they do not work well with tweets.

Those are the seven ways to tell whether someone is a newbie on Twitter or not. What are your thoughts on the list? Is there another method you use to tell whether someone is a newbie or not? Please share your thoughts and methods below.