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A final whimper for Twitter
While many people are only now jumping on the Twitter bandwagon, many of us are already getting off. It is only recently that Google decided to incorporate Twitter timelines in an effort to incorporate social relevance into its search results. It seems like only yesterday we grasped that Twitter is not a monetisation platform but a measurability platform. The truth is, however, that Twitter seems to be on its last breath, writes Steven Brewis.
To maintain your Twitter account has become a bore and the mindless hours of un-following and searching hardly seems worth it anymore. We still come up with strategies and sell clients the big dream of micro blogging on Twitter, but the truth is – the only people left on Twitter are industry experts, self-proclaimed gurus, users who invested much time in getting their first 2 000 followers, and people trying to monetise Twitter with spam.
The truly sad thing is that Twitter has some of the coolest and most valuable third-party applications that a social platform could beg for, but it could also be Twitter’s own undoing. Using the Twitter application programming interface (API) is pretty simple and the restrictions to using it are pretty lenient.
If you use Twitter to feed potential customers with valuable and relevant content, you will probably find the return on investment to be very low. The only feedback we get from Twitter is other people’s tweets.
Clicks from Twitter may be plenty if you have more than 11k followers, but do yourself a favour and see how many of those clicks are legitimate visits by setting up some "goals" in Google Analytics.
The problem from a user perspective is that there are simply too many scammers and spammers, so your one little feed that is auto ReTweeted five times a day, simply cannot keep up. Third-party applications such as TweetDeck are great for fishing for relevant content, but that reminds us too much of early Webmail days where we all ended up closing our Hotmail accounts.
There are essentially two methods of filtering your timeline: you can use the search button, or you can manually un-follow inappropriate followers, but that is a taxing and laborious commitment.
The catch-22 with Twitter is that no one takes anything you say seriously if you do not have at least 3k followers, and by that time all you are doing is pushing ReTweets and ’Future Tweet’ feeds.
Most Twitter users do not even use Twitter to read their timelines and there are a few problems with that, too. If you are using something like TweetDeck or Friendfeed, you are likely to skip over your Twitter feeds and move on to more relevant or personal feeds.
Sure, you can use TweetBeeps to pretend you have your finger on the pulse, but in our experience, the majority of those tweets are companies posing as individuals with endorsements that are essentially unusable – which is not only bad for Twitter, but puts the entire concept of social endorsements in jeopardy.
If your strategy is to use Twitter as an aggregator, I propose there are more sophisticated and appropriate platforms for that, too.
In fact, merely aggregating feeds blindly is a cheap technique for having consistent feeds on all your platforms, but certainly does not do much for individual strategies and leveraging platforms for what they are intended for. The truth is that most clients do not have the resources to spend time on unique platforms, but that is unfortunately the only way to do it correctly.
Twitter may as well completely abandon the ‘Direct Message’ idea because I do not think anyone is willing to scroll through reams of auto responders to see if there is perhaps an important message there somewhere.
The biggest problem with Twitter is that you cannot use your feeds to obtain an accurate feel for what is topical because for every one person following you, there are at least 50 spammers and scammers following you as well. That also means you can never really have a niche following on Twitter.
I used to be a Twitter enthusiast and I still think there is hope. The most recent Twitter development, where you create lists, is a great step, but it may just be too little too late.
Ultimately, users need to have more control and all forms of spamming and scamming have to be eradicated in much the same way as the early e-mail days.
The question has to be asked: if we agree that Twitter is essentially a micro blogging platform, is it really is that much better than the competitors? Tumblr, for example, allows users to do much more, much more effectively.
And if there was ever a time for Jaiku to step out of the Twitter shadow and learn from its mistakes, that time is now.
Steven Brewis is executive creative director / online strategist at Fluorescence Interactive
