April 18, 2011

I was doing my every weekend visit to Yahoo’s technology news section this past weekend and I came across an article written by Business Insider writer Nicholas Carlson about how Twitter had “Troubles.” Feel free to check out this link to the article (it will open in a new tab/page). Basically Mr. Carlson writes about how Twitter may not be the social networking giant many people thinks it is. He outlines how of the 200 million members Twitter has, only 20 million are regular active users. He also discusses how there has been a lot of turmoil at top of the company.

This got me thinking about how I feel about Twitter. I’ve only been on the social networking site for about 3 months now and in all honest, it’s not what I expected at all. I had heard of Twitter about two years ago before I finally signed up to check it out myself back in January. I delayed signing up because I thought to myself “what’s the point?” Then I had meetings and discussions with a few web design friends as well as online marketers who swore that Twitter was the next big thing in online marketing. I figured since I wanted to get my name out there as a freelance web designer, I may as well give it a try. I post usually 2 or 3 tweets a day, mostly about web design and a few about pop culture and sports. So far I have 34 followers and I’m following 13.

My problem with Twitter is I really don’t think it’s the online marketing giant that people make it out to be. As the article by Mr. Carlson mentions, I find that people are more about writing on Twitter than reading. The only people who get followed by enough people to get online marketing done are mainstream celebs or athletes who tweet about the same nothingness regular people do.

Of the 13 people I follow, I probably only really care about 6 or 7 of them. The others I only follow because they follow me. I find that to be another annoyance. Even though I have 34 followers now, I’d guess that over 60 different people have followed me at one time or another. The problem is, they only followed me so I would follow them back. Once I didn’t, they stopped following.

As far as the Twitter search function goes, that’s another joke. A simple search for tweets about “Windsor Ontario” was filled with 70% escort spam, 20% Justin Bieber fans hoping he’d come to Windsor and 10% quality posts. Pretty weak numbers if you ask me.

I’m sure there are people who still think Twitter is great for online marketing for both large and small businesses, but I just don’t see it. You’d probably have to follow 1000 people just to get 700 to follow you back. You’d also have to be a tweet freak posting 10+ tweets a day. I just don’t have time for that.

I’ll continue using Twitter because I have made 1 or 2 quality connections in the past 3 months and there are the odd trends that catch my eye, however for the foreseeable future I’m going to say Twitter isn’t nearly what I expected.