Honestly, I've never understood the appeal of Twitter. Maybe many other people feel similarly?
I read somewhere that the vast majority of Twitter accounts are bots or completely inactive.
I read somewhere that the vast majority of Twitter accounts are bots or completely inactive.
They don't invade your privacy or try to become your portal to the internet or do many of the other things that I don't like about facebook.
Sadly, it looks like investors and the economy feel differently.
I could honestly see a post-social-media world though where facebook dies and twitter is the sole survivor.
What is frustrating to me though: as an outsider that is not logged in to twitter, is that visiting the site almost forces you to log in before you can find anything. If you know you can go to twitter.com/search/ then fine, but you won't find that link on their home page.
For that matter, the twitter home page doesn't even tell you what it is, I guess at this point we're just supposed to know.
Well it does say "Start a conversation, explore your interests, and be in the know." so it does give some indication. But yeah I'm guessing not many people are landing on their home page having no clue what Twitter is.
Over time, I've learned to unfollow actual news sources, but instead I follow a collection of editors (who wind up performing a very useful curation function). I'll still follow links to actual news stories, but I never go to any news web pages directly anymore.
I'm pretty good about constantly pruning my follow list, as I actually read all of my timeline. (Most people seem to have decided that that is futile, and only occasionally read their stream).
My stream has around 60 accounts, and I also read my whole timeline. It already feels like this is approaching the maximum that I'll be willing and able to give proper attention to. I'll probably prune some of the lower quality ones out before I add any more.
I've had to unfollow lots of people who tweet a lot.
I've been using Twitter since 2007 (my account id number is in the 6-figures range). I feel like it took about a year or so to figure out how I wanted to use the service (and for there to be people I was interested in following), and it's only maybe the past year that I've discovered the benefit of unfollowing news accounts and following specific editors instead.
I also have pretty varied interests (I think the mix of people I follow is pretty evenly distributed between fashion people, photographers, news editors, functional programming people, infosec people, and comedians). That mix gets adjusted periodically as my interests shift (I unfollowed a lot of infosec people about a year ago as I've tried to extract myself from that community).
It's a work in progress.
I don't use it, but I can see why some people do. Having said that, I really don't see how they will be profitable in the long term.
You pay a bunch of money to them, and get almost nothing in return.
It's not nearly as effective dollar-for-dollar as using, for example, google advertising... or just investing in using Email Marketing and building a list.
(I don't see how any social networks will be profitable long term).
Twitter is good for brand marketing, which is inherently harder to measure. It's also great for reaching audiences that are heavy users of Twitter--like tech folks, "thought leaders," and reporters.
They visit social networks with the intention to be social. Reading an advert, clicking on it, and buying some product is the last thing on their mind.
We don't go to Twitter to read ads.