Why do people continue to sack ride twitter?
I just read Vivek’s post on Techcrunch titled Twitter and Me! Why It’s The Only Social Media Tool I Use. and I figured, I’d give my two cents.
Twitter sucks. There is too much noise, too little quality, and if you are a business, the engagement time is non-existent. Putting all your eggs in that one basket is insane. You gotta diversify.
But for now let’s focus on twitter. Let’s explore it further.
1. Noise - right now I’m only following 24 people(That number used to be higher, but I got tired of being spammed by people like Guy Kawasaki, who puts out something like 400-500 tweets a day). And even now, important messages get lost in the noise. I had to go as far as create a list for a single person, because that was the ONE person from whom I actually wanted to hear(and the only reason that works, is because I’m using TweetDeck which alerts me when there is activity in the list).
2. Low Quality - twitter is the land of spammers and bloggers. I’d say 99% of people using twitter now, are those who have something to pitch(a product, a blog, a service). Hey..I’m no different, I didn’t even register for twitter myself, until I needed to start promoting Style Guidance. The problem is, that Twitter ranks all messages the same. 10 messages in a 5 minute period, back to back from Guy Kawasaki, rank just as high as a single message from someone who posts once a day.
3. It sucks for business - the engagement time is non-existent! Anyone who follows a business twitter account, will probably be following hundreds if not thousands of other accounts. So your all important tweet will ALWAYS get lost in the noise.
I’ll give you an example…I got my site tweeted by someone with 12K followers. It was glowing praise, and urged people to check the site out. It wasn’t even someone who spams a ton of crappy tweets, this was a person who always puts out quality stuff. He is actually the person for whom I created his own list, so that I didn’t miss any of his tweets.
And do you know how much traffic I got from this glowing praise? 8 clicks. Out of 12,000 followers. How is that for user engagement? Sure if the guy spammed tweets every 5 minutes, that number would be higher, but that’s the whole point! The only way to succeed on twitter from posting updates, is to spam the crap out of everyone.
The only other way to make twitter work for business, is to do what Gary Vaynerchuk(@garyvee) does. Let people @message you, and then engaging them with advice one on one. I actually used that myself a week or so ago…asked him what wine to buy, then got into the car, and drove to Wine Library to buy it.
However, that’s also the reason I don’t follow Gary. Why? Because if I do, my stream would be filled with Gary’s conversations with other people.
I mean let’s be honest here, did 847,000 of Gary’s followers, really care that Gary recommended me to buy wine X? No. But 847,000 followers of his, got to read all about it anyways.
Some Suggestions:
Twitter really needs to make it easier for people to filter out the more active users. And yes I know we can always un follow them, but there is usually one or two gems in that stream of tweets, that you shouldn’t really be forced to miss.
So here are a few suggestions on how to improve twitter, to make it easier to use for regular folks:
1. @Name for example…why exactly are we supposed to hit that to find out if anyone mentioned us? How hard is it to code a counter next to @username so you can know there are new mentions, without hitting that link. Those @username posts are usually important, why isn’t twitter making it easier to find them?
2. Direct Messages, good idea…but why does the thing show all messages, without telling us the # of unread ones? Why am I supposed to always keep in mind that I had ### DMs yesterday, and today I have ### +1….which means I have 1 new one. How about having it say: Direct Messages: 20(3) with 3 being the # of unread ones? How hard can it be?
3. Let us pick who we want in our homepage stream. All twitter accounts aren’t equal, why should someone like Guy Kawasaki who puts out a torrent of tweets rank higher in my stream than someone who puts out one per day? Let us give priority to people, so that any truly important message, gets featured at the top. Let us select specific twitters which we want to show up at the top of our stream.
Twitter could be so much more, but right now it seems like Twitter is perfectly content with letting all the developers do their work for them with the API. The problem with that, is that the only people who use those products by other developers, are the active users. Regular folks who decide to give twitter a try, never hear about that, find the site completely useless, and never come back.
