Twitter Has Serious Problems?
OK I’ll admit that it took me a while to “get” Twitter, and that wasn’t helped by my complete ignorance of Twitter clients such as TweetDeck.
I would tend to lump Twitter in with instant messaging systems such as AIM and MSN, but it’s subtly different. Twitter is not really designed to be a “chat” service, though it can sometimes be used as one, but provides a great way to send out all kinds of information to your followers.
For example, if your usage of Twitter is purely social, you might post small messages indicating what you’re doing, where you’re going, what music you’re listening to etc.
If you use Twitter to connect with clients, you might post small messages to provide details of new offers.
If you’re in the coaching game, you can use Twitter to provide followers with small nuggets of valuable information.
Twitter really is a messaging platform for all occasions and, with the emergence of various web widgets, you can put your Twitter feed and contact details right in front of your site visitors, in a seamless fashion.
A frequent accusation levelled at Twitter is that “it’s just Facebook status updates without any of the other functionality”. That, in my book at least, is a strength. Isolating that one piece of functionality immediately makes it more suitable for the array of duties identified above.
When status updates are tied in with a much larger system like Facebook, with a potentially mixed “audience” of friends, family, old school mates, colleagues etc. it would be harder to put out specific, targetted messages.
So what “problems” has Twitter got? Well, again I have to admit to being a part of the problem at one stage – partly because I hadn’t worked Twitter out at that stage, and partly because I was believing some of the traffic generation claims.
The big big problem is over-automation – there are countless systems, services, applications and “how to” guides giving a complete system that is supposed to “explode” your web traffic, get you 1000s of followers etc. etc.
To my mind this then starts to make Twitter operate a lot more like a Traffic Exchange, only with less interesting content. Not only are Tweets an endless stream of adverts, opt-in links and affiliate links, but all the space in between is filled with automated “What’s everyone talking about” messages, ReTweets, messages about new systems that will explode your business and so on.
This poor signal-to-noise ratio will kill the service eventually – just like the old Usenet newsgroups have been killed by spammers and trolls. Automated use of Twitter is NOT a viable, long-term strategy that will be of benefit to your business.
Automated use of Twitter will make you look like a newbie, and a clueless one at that, a follower (when you need to be a leader) and a spammer. Your “followers” will comprise mostly of people who don’t read their Tweets (because they are on automatic pilot as well) and the few good contacts you manage to get, will simply unfollow you when they get bored of the value-less “content” you put out there.
SOME automation of Twitter is great – e.g for letting people know about updates on your blog, But at the heart of the system, just like EVERYTHING else, is old-fashioned manual use of the service, including making genuine connections and building relationships.
To summarise, Twitter is an excellent tool once you work it out; but using it as an automated spam-bot will result in Twitter’s premature death.
You can touch base with me at http://twitter.com/avallach/
Gaz
