Report: 44% of Twitter Accounts Have Never Sent a Tweet
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
I've found that when I don't want a response I can file a bug report or send an email. When I do I can publicly whine on twitter and @-someone.
It sorta feels bad to do but it really does work.
The use case I'd like to use twitter for is trying out some jokes/"deep thoughts", but I don't have enough followers so I just tweet them to the wind and I'll never how just how unfunny I really am. I can definitely understand why most people would use it as a follow-only service - it's somewhat depressing to knowingly broadcast to (almost) nobody.
[1] Wow that's been a word for at least five years. I guess that's not too surprising...
> #baseball combines the two things Americans love most: Perfect lawns and arguments in hindsight about the decisions that professionals make.
I wrote this, but think it's funnier without the hashtag.
With many more I can think of things that I considered really funny, but had no conceivable way of adding hashtags without taking away from the brevity:
> I propose we start calling snow plow guys "Storm Troopers"
> The first stage of grief is learning to pronounce the disease.
Where could I hashtag those up without making them considerably less funny? I think the brevity is required for maximum "impact", and I don't wanna detract by putting a hashtag in the middle, because its the sentence equivalent of stressing a syllable awkwardly.
Some people on Twitter have turned this awkward word-stressing into an art. Comedian Rob Delaney comes to mind as an expert in maximizing the awkwardness of it.
"The first stage of grief is learning to pronounce the disease #joke #black humour #funny #comedy"
You'd look like a colossal ass if you did that.
I think it's different, however, if there are a few hashtags at the end which in themselves are jokes or metajokes and that add to the cleverness of the post, in the same way that XKCD alt-text does. A string of simple categories (#joke #jokes #funny #comedy) is just annoying.
You also describe the usual chicken and egg problem any social medium involves. Nobody will follow you without interesting content and if you have no followers, you're less inclined to spend time posting it. Break out of that cycle by spending a limited amount of time on our tweets first. Make mistakes and figure out your voice while you don't have a bunch of followers yet. See if the 140 character limit works for you e.g.. Find value in the process of coming up with the content in the first place. If you still enjoy that, then you're well equipped for a larger following.
"Swearing at brands on twitter really is the new and awesome 'nuclear option' for receiving full-on customer support."
back when brands were first getting on twitter, and those of us with a few followers suddenly realize the huge power those brands had accidentally handed over. e.g. Cable internet companies that would normally jerk you around and put you on hold for hours, but one little slightly-swear-word-infused tweet and suddenly you get gold-plated service. Those days were awesome.
I rarely use Twitter, but I do see the value it provides to help businesses and customers connect.
Well the majority of this 44% is almost certainly just spam accounts.
I have about 100 followers. I know most of those are probably spam bots. For the remaining, many are inactive. Others have thousands of followers (zero chance of reading anything I write). Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. Or shouting in an empty field. I'm not surprised users avoid tweeting.
There's kind of this cool aspect where you can just respond to anyone and feel involved in a highly visible conversation. But you quickly realize you have a good chance of seeming like a creep for butting into a conversation that, though public, is really intended to be among friends.
This is actually one of the 2 reasons why I use Twitter:
- following interesting people (like John Carmack)
- keeping a "diary" of interesting links on a variety of subjects
This isn't a slight against you, we all budget our time for what's important to us and cultural norms vary. I'm just surprised when I see someone with a manageable number of followers and they allow spammers to join in. I check the profile, tweet history, and if it sets my bullshit detector off even slightly I block them and report them as spam.
Quality over quantity, always.
One problem with blocking bots is sometimes I really can't tell if they are bots. Bots often copy profile pictures, descriptions, and tweets from real users. Some real users tweet pretty cryptic stuff. And blocking feels like such a serious step; I wouldn't watch to risk false positives.
I've only had one false positive I know of and it was one of my wife's friends. She had a profile picture of her teenage daughters and no tweet history. I thought 'what the hell is a teenage girl doing following me - guaranteed spammer' only to find out who it was the next day. I unblocked and no offense was taken and no harm done.
Still, I guess I'm a bit stricter than average and this is something that most people don't care about.
I've never looked at any person's Twitter account and judged them by how many likely spam bots they have. I assume spam bots follow people all the time and I don't hold it against them for becoming victims.
Otherwise, I follow people that have more interesting things to say. It's how I know what's going on in the development world. I barely follow anyone outside of my field.
Although, funny thing happened once. I commented on someone's tweet pointing out a bit of hypocrisy and his defense was I didn't have enough followers to warrant being able to say anything in the first place. Apparently I'm in a popularity contest I didn't know I was in.
If you are tweeting and hoping someone to pay attention and no one is, I could understand the frustration.
I'm thinking of getting back into the habit of doing a tech blog that's more for me to keep tracks of the interesting tidbits of information and code I come up with doing my job. I guess that's a similar deal to your idea of tweeting as a diary.
Unfortunately, there is no way to measure this case, except for counting the people you follow or the people who are following you. Then you could know whether that user is somewhat active.
This data wouldn't show on outside measurements (like in the article) but would help Twitter know who is active and not.
Logged out without sending a single tweet and never went back. I still get a few emails from them every month wondering what happened to me. Still can't figure out why I would need an account.
Every time someone tries to create a new platform that will finally open up the Internet to the long-standing promise of widespread two-way communications, the same thing keeps happening: The platform turns into a broadcast medium where a few use it to promote something and the vast majority sit back and consume. BBS systems, E-mail, USENET, almost all message boards, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can change the protocol, make it Web-2.0, limit it to 140 characters, add AJAX, but you can't change human nature.
For example, I registered www.ameristartup.com a few weeks back. At the exact time I was creating the Facebook page someone else created the @ameristartup twitter account. To date the twitter account has remained inactive (no followers, no following, no tweets, no profile pic, ect...). I naively notified Twitter thinking they would have interest in curbing this type of behavior, but I received the form corporate response of f-off.
The idea that your Twitter feed is an unfiltered firehose, and that you can use Twitter how you want (follow, tweet, or not) makes it all the more powerful and redundant to shifting consumer trends.
As long as Twitter doesn't hork the various tools/services used to access the service, no one should "get sick" or be fatigued by Twitter as there is not one standard experience.
A family member of mine just signed up for Twitter but didn't want anyone to know for various reasons (they are not interested in gaining a "following"). They just wanted to follow a few folks/entities they're interested in and that's it. This is a good thing ... Twitter remains "useful" without dictating how my family member and others has to use it.
The "hands-off" approach should also appeal to businesses looking to partner with, or provide tie-ins to the Twitter service.
I would argue the more lightweight and open-ended Twitter is in regards to how it works, the better.
The DM feature? You can only message followers, kinda useless.
With RSS I just got the news/blog posts I care about, nothing more. Following people on twitter I get some good links but mostly a lot of noise about personal life crap I really don't care. Normally I stop following someone if the valuable links to noise ratio gets too low.
#notinterestedinwhereyouaredrinkingtonight
see @daringfireball vs. @gruber.
or the various @HN feeds.
Not if you check it once a day (or even once an hour depending on how many things you follow), it's gone by then.
And that's the folly of most of these social sites. They send you so much data that it eventually becomes a cacophony, and you just want the noise to go away. Instead of searching for notification settings on the respective sites, it's far easier to filter emails (it takes me 5 seconds to create a filter in GMail).
There's a very fine line between meaningful engagement online and annoying nagging. I can see why Facebook is focusing on chat apps, because I think they've discovered that having a social network that is, at its essence, a layer on top of email is a losing prospect. A chat app is a channel outside email that isn't easily dismantled by a filter.
But what I REALLY derive value in, is it's my always streaming news source. Follow a dozen or so news sites (both local, world, and niche-focused, such as tech and marketing) and I'm always up to date on what's going on.
A well curated Twitter account is going to beat out almost any individual news source.
While I do know Twitter botting is a huge issue, I also (anecdotally) know a lot of people who only use Twitter for consumption who have never tweeted anything themselves.
Sites like Twitter and reddit (and HN, to a lesser degree) probably get a higher proportion of contributing users than your average forum or Q&A site by lowering the barriers to contributing.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...
It's great for contacting the public face of something in a fashion that makes it impossible to handle the matter privately. Every business or elected-official is super-gracious and accommodating on Twitter because the world is watching.
I think a lot of those accounts were mopped up by folks who then lost interest or forgot their credentials/lost email addresses etc...
If there is an dead account which never had any sort activity, is there some legal/moral way to get its username? I would like to buy it, but owner does not respond. There is also no trademark violation, so I can not use official way Twitter handles this cases.
If I were to start sending tweets, I'd just be the electronic equivalent of the guy who hangs out on a bench in the park near my house muttering under his breath all day.
also: who cares?