There’s this big fad going around you may have heard of. It’s called social media. It includes blogs and sites like Facebook and Twitter, among other things. Marketers are desperately trying to harness social media into some kind of marketing tool and failing miserably, costing companies thousands and thousands of dollars. Just what do they hope to accomplish exactly? Anyone who uses social media or does marketing should be able to see how useless most of it is, and most especially Twitter.
I just found the Twitter page on Facebook today. How disappointing. Here is their wall:
“Follow me I follow back”
“I will follow back I promise!”
“Please follow me and I follow you”
So on and so forth. Sorry but if the price of getting 20,000 followers on Twitter is following 20,000 people, doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Why would you follow all of these people? Let me explain this in simple terms for those who don’t use it.
In Facebook, you can friend up to 5,000 people. Even then, if you don’t particularly like someone, you can still block their updates from your news feed. Not so with Twitter. Whoever you follow crowds your timeline with gems like:
“Going to pick up my cousin from school now.”
“sick of being lonely 
”
“Someone amuse me?”
These are actual updates of actual users who are on Twitter’s page on Facebook begging for followers. How riveting. Why wouldn’t anyone want to follow updates like that? And here’s the best part, once you have followed all of these people, when you log in to Twitter, this is all you see! How fantastic!
Now, I use Twitter, and I follow all of 50 people maybe. Most do not follow me. In fact, I have no idea how many followers I have. I don’t care how many followers I have. I almost never Tweet anything. When I do, it is just a link to something like a blog post. In fact, this blog post will get posted to Twitter ironically enough.
But I use it to follow people in my industry who have important things to say. Twitter is a good tool for that. But I fall into th 1% of users who actually use it for something useful. The spammers, trolls and other online refuse make up the bulk of users. And that’s sad. But that’s how it is.
Which leads me to the point. Twitter is completely useless. Why? Because almost no one following you knows you or cares about you or what you have to say. You are just another follower to them. They only follow you because you follow them. In fact, most of the people you are following you don’t know or care about either.
At the end of the day it is a popularity contest. Everyone is trying to be the one with the most followers, and they follow whoever they need to in order to get there. If you have 20,000 followers or 20, it doesn’t matter, because like most people you have your family and close friends. No matter how many followers you get, your family and close friends are still the only people who give a hoot about anything you have to say.
My blog for example. I write it as if a lot of people who don’t know me are reading it. It’s been viewed all of 265 times since I started it. All of these views have come from the same 5 or 6 people who know me. (You know who you are.) The truth is, hardly anyone reads what I have to say. Now suppose I tweeted it to 20,000 people I don’t know. Would anyone care? Nope. Still wouldn’t read it, because even though a lot of people may be following me according to Twitter, only a handful of people are really following me. And that’s true for everyone on Twitter.
Now for marketers. Stop trying to use Twitter. I know, I know, you have all this fancy data. Let me guess, it goes something like “Well take a look at the social media campaign of [insert globally recognized brand], they have a huge ROI!” Well I’ll be, say it ain’t so! You mean someone like McDonald’s can tweet something like “99 cents for a hamburger today” and people go buy hamburgers? Well then, you should make a twitter account for your hole-in-the-wall store no one knows about and wait for the people to come flooding in!
Obviously huge brands that everyone in the world knows of are going to be successful. They are huge brands because they have huge followings and loyal fan bases already. So giving their following and loyal fans something to friend, follow or like is going to work. If no one knows who you are, you aren’t going to get discovered by getting on Twitter. It’s just not the way to build a brand. It’s more like a way to measure a brand.
So if you want to see how popular your brand is, get it on Twitter, get it on Facebook. See what kind of following you can get. And try it without the reciprocal followers that are so prevalent out there. Just see who likes you. Now give it a month. See where you are at. This is a good measure of how popular your brand is.
Think I am wrong? Please show me an example of a completely unknown brand that created a strong online presence via Twitter or Facebook. The only ones who have successfully used social media are the big brands. What a coincidence. Since most brands, stores and websites are relatively unknown, let’s see an example of one that has used social media to become known. Would love to hear if it has been or can be done.
My name is 
June 2nd, 2011 at 4:46 pm
i’m one of your 5 readers
. i like your rants! haha
June 2nd, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Wow Dan, I’m also one of those 5 readers, but I think you really missed the mark here. Saying Twitter (and other Social Media) is completely useless is an extremely myopic view of web, and of the direction that things are going.
People want to know what their friends think, they also want to connect with real people. Social Media helps companies (of any size) connect with their consumer base, and vice versa. It, in effect, peels back the corporate veil and makes things personal. People want to buy from people, not from faceless entities.
Twitter is full of spammers? America is full of jerks- is it useless too?
Do I think that Twitter and/or Facebook are the only means with which to build a brand? No, but they are definitely an important part of fleshing out your brand and making it real to people. Social media is to brand building what a proper diet is to an exercise regimen, it supplements, and makes your activities all the more effective.
The bottom line is that while Social Media is not the messiah of the web, it is definitely a useful tool that should and can be utilized effectively to give any brand a fuller identity.
June 2nd, 2011 at 6:20 pm
I can think of a couple companies that made their name with Facebook and Twitter. Of course, those companies are Facebook and Twitter, so I don’t think that’s what you were looking for …
June 2nd, 2011 at 9:39 pm
Ian, I should clarify myself as it sounds like I am clumping all social media into one useless pile. While Twitter is useless, Facebook is definitely not. I think the difference is engagement. Facebook users tend to spend a lot of time on Facebook and do a lot of interacting. On Twitter, because of limited space, you don’t see conversations, useful information or much of anything…except links to useful information.
so I think every worthwhile brand should have a social presence. Definitely. The problem is people like you and me who know what it is and how to effectively use it aren’t the ones running the social media campaigns of so many small businesses out there. It’s starting to drive me crazy to be honest. These companies are literally wasting their time and resources. It’s a bit disheartening.
In all of it, I find that people keep encouraging the use of Twitter, as if it is useful. I would say twitter is for existing brands with an established identity, brand and website. Newcomers don’t tend to do well on twitter. I just think of my own twitter. Few people follow me. i follow even fewer. it’s a feed reader of sorts, and I only have it because of the industry I am in to be honest. You almost have to follow people like Danny Sullivan, Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin.
So it is kind of fun to throw down a tweet once in a while, but it can just as easily be your facebook status, and it would be more engaging and effective that way anyway. So my personal take is social media can be good if done right, which is rare, and twitter is almost completely useless for marketing purposes.
Now excuse me, i have to donate to Mitt and then go “get my rear in gear” heh heh. And for anyone who doesn’t get that, no, I’m not gay.
June 2nd, 2011 at 10:07 pm
First off- well played sir.
I appreciate the fact that Twitter can get people worked up- and I definitely see where you’re coming from with that. I also very much agree that there are many (most) small businesses out there that are wasting there time online. But I think that saying that “because some people don’t know how to use it, it must all be useless” is kind of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Social Media, and Twitter in particular, are very karma driven. You get out of it what you put into it. If you pop a tweet off every so often, you’ll get a response back every so often, and it won’t be meaningful. (unless you ruffle some e-feathers with a scathing opinion
) One of the biggest mistakes that people make with Twitter is treating it like a Facebook status update- it’s not. Twitter, like the internet, has a lot of great information, but you have to know where to look. If you spend your day looking at trending topics, you’ll get a lot about justin bieber and lady gaga, with a little bit of breaking news. But if you reach out and talk to other thought leaders, you’ll be surprised who responds back.
Socia Media is very much a reflection of the conversations that are going on in peoples living rooms, dinner tables, and gatherings- and this is where Twitter shines- Facebook is very gated. You can only see information from your friends. Twitter is open. You can see the things that people are saying always (unless they protect their tweets- which in my estimation defeats the purpose of twitter)and as such you can get great feedback on yourself and your competitors, as well as make genuine contacts- again, as you said, it has to be done in the right way.
Anyway, I think you make some great points- there is a lot of useless junk out there- I just think that the value outweighs the beiberfever.
June 3rd, 2011 at 9:40 am
Then rather than be completely useless we’ll say Twitter is just mostly useless, and only worthwhile for people who actually use it properly. If I had to guess I would say that is less than 10% of all users. So while it can be used advantageously, it mostly isn’t being used that way, which is why people who don’t know anything about it are usually just wasting their time with it.
And I think Twitter should instantly ban every account whose tweets are “lol, [insert trending topic] is trending.”
June 17th, 2011 at 12:44 am
Twitter is just for status updating i feel =S