Following is a guest post from Steve Alberts, our senior digital strategist in Chicago. Steve is one of the more creative strategists on the team, and is always entertaining. Please check out our other guest posts too.
Last week was the week that Twitter finally “broke.” Starting with Obama’s address to congress on Tuesday evening, everyone from Matt Lauer to Sean Hannity were reporting about Congressmen with their heads in their Blackberries Twittering during his speech. It didn’t stop the rest of the week. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert lambasted the microblogging platform ruthlessly. Keith Olbermann reported on Newt Gingrich Twittering and I found it so amusing that I just had to Twitter about it! The blogosphere went nuts. Twitter was everywhere. The week reached its peak on February 27, when the Daily Beast proclaimed it “The Week Twitter Jumped the Shark”.
While I disagree strongly with that headline because it implies that Twitter was ever as cool as Fonzie, I revisited a thought I had a few weeks ago: The more popular Twitter gets – the less useful it becomes.
The clear advantage of Twitter as a communications medium is the ability to easily scan the activities of those whose every move you deem worthy to follow. This is selective information delivery at its very best. It makes one-to-one marketing look like a dated concept – the potential for consumer engagement is huge. However, the more people you follow and the more that people use the tool, the more cluttered the delivery of information becomes. Your Twitter home page becomes overloaded with information by people you may like personally – but just do not want to know all that much about. You may get a deluge of SMS messages flooding your Blackberry — a mercifully optional feature. It might be your co-worker down the hall or it may be Newt Gingrich. For me, the best feature of the Twitter platform was the “scanability” of relevant information. However, this scanability is reduced each time your Twitter universe of “followers and followees” grows. I find myself checking it and using it less and less.
Is anyone else having the same experience? Let’s discuss!
Anywhere but Twitter.
March 4th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Yes and no – I have become much more selective on whose tweets come to my phone (yes Steve – you are one of them)…I also think that there are several apps that let you manage the information fairly well…in the end I can still choose to follow only those people before Twitter became popular and be selective.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
Simple solution: Tweetdeck. The ability to categorize the people you follow into groups minimizes the problem.
Just like any other social media, clutter is always an issue. It’s even worse on Facebook. Do people really want to keep track of 500 “friends”?
The result of the growing popularity of Twitter isn’t that it’s going to implode on itself but rather users/developers need to find better ways of managing all the available information that a resource like Twitter can bring. AIR apps like Tweetdeck and Twhirl are good first steps.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
A recent trend on twitter, as you may already know, is deleting everyone you follow and starting over again. I haven’t come to that point yet with whom I follow, but it is not a bad idea for people who are following too many people. I take time to read a person’s profile and tweets before I consider adding them. The number of people who I follow and who follow me is relatively small, but I don’t think about the number, I think about the quality.
March 4th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
come on………I use only twitter client, that way your SMS mail box won’t hurt
March 4th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
Totally agree that tweetdeck helps a ton in managing one’s listening. I consider that the broader your listening range, the better. Good thing is that unfollowing is easy. A good clean out session of the people you follow is healthy I think. It fine tunes your listening.
No doubt though that it is a great tool for all communicators when put to good use. Trick is to learn to master it. Check out this presentation on twitter that was made available just today http://bit.ly/2viKHR it contains a ‘why should we care?’ section that hit it on the head.
The firs series of slides
March 4th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I think the whole selectiveness of the new social media scene in general is one of it’s defining factors. You cannot hold it back, and in there lies it’s strenght. Yes you might run into clutter, but it is clutter you can quickly filter.
Personally I have just discovered Twitter, and as such I am not overrun by unimportant tweets – and the whole selection process – well thats just plain fun. Though a relevance search tool would be nice. Is there one out there?
March 13th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Yes, TweetDeck is amazing for helping sift through the clutter but I’m with Elizabeth on this one. I focus on the quality, not the quantity, and this makes a huge difference. Too many folks are obsessed with numbers of followers – yet another popularity contest – instead of what they are actually getting from the tool.
March 22nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm
form is empty & emptiness is form
April 8th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I agree with those who have spoken about TweetDeck and doing a ‘cull’ of people you are following (not literally, of course) – it’s the only to make the information useful.
The way in which the big news organisations have jumped on this – BBC, CNN etc – means you get a deluge of tweets from them every time someone newsworthy (or even not newsworthy) opens their mouth. However, it’s more a question of managing what you follow than ditching the whole thing.
April 15th, 2009 at 5:09 am
I use Google Reader to categorise and to provide a coherent view of the various feeds from a certain entity I am following, say a client. So I’d group a client’s twitter, twitter search results of the client’s name, plus its other RSS feeds into one cateogry.
And a twitter client with a clean and simple interface, such as dabr.co.uk and tweet.net, helps make scanning through hundreds of new tweets less a headache.
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:23 am
For me, one issue is still that — regardless the interface — the feed mechanism always prioritizes the most current above the older. I wish there were a way to keep those things that I would find relevant in a spot that looks relevant to me.
A tweet from 8 hours ago (or even 8 days!) might mean more than one this moment