Subtitle: Thoughts from a new Twitter user.
There’s no doubting the ever-increasing popularity of Twitter. Its continuing meteoric growth rate puts it on track to become social networking’s killer app. Yet the question still has to be asked: Why is Twitter so popular? And another: Is it a useful marketing medium?
First let’s recap on the user experience. At the most basic level a Twitter user simply inputs an entry of up to 140 characters then clicks “Update”. The tweet as it’s become known gets blasted into cyberspace and displayed in the timeline of each of that user’s followers.
What to include in your tweet? Ah, good point. Twitter itself invites us to answer the question: “What are you doing?” Truly this is a narcissist’s dream come true, if taken literally. But there’s a limit to the number of followers who’ll remain interested in being updated on your every move, thought, action, or whatever. That’s a content issue best left at one end of the communication spectrum.
Being continuously updated on what your followers are doing is all well and good. But are you getting the whole story? Because of the extremely viral nature of Twitter membership, it is highly unlikely that you’ll have many followers in common with other users. One outcome of this is that you will oftentimes be observing only one side of a “conversation” between any two users. And unless your follower identifies who they’re tweeting to (by typing @[username]) you’ll be left pretty much in the dark as to what’s going on.
Call me controversial, but I suggest that Twitter users apparently don’t care about the detail contained in tweets in their timeline. I’ve come to that conclusion after observing the frantic, almost lemming-like quest to accumulate followers among Twitter users. To help accelerate and automate this process, there are any number of paid and unpaid “increase your follower numbers” services and tools.
Which leads me to the obvious: the pros and cons of the commercialzation of Twitter! I wonder what proportion of the billions of daily 140 character tweets are completely commercial free? And among which demographic(s)? As an internet marketer doubtless my own timeline is rather skewed towards those who one way or another promote something for profit. I do it myself directly or indirectly in the majority of my tweets. After all, my computer is my tool of trade, the universe of Internet users my market.
At face value Twitter appears to be a marketer’s dream medium. It’s a snap to put your message in front of your followers as frequently as you desire. But that’s where caution should be exercised in my view. Just as a constant stream of self important “I’m doing this, I’m doing that” tweets will eventually become tiresome, so will a never-ending bombardment of “visit my link” updates ultimately alienate your followers. After all, don’t forget that real people operate the keyboards downstream of your tweets. The smart internet marketer will treat their presence there and on her follower list as a privilege rather than regarding them all as a captive audience hungering for her product or service.
