29 Apr When Does a Social Media Tool Make Social Media Un-Social?
Twitter, as has been said many, many times, is all about the conversation. It’s about engagement and it’s about human relationships. Hundreds of tools have been developed to facilitate ‘the conversation’, from platforms such as Seesmic and Hootsuite to help manage followers to analytical tools such as Klout and Twitalyzer to assist in analysing how well you’re influencing people. The majority of these tools are, to varying degrees, helpful. But occasionally one pops up that makes no sense whatsoever. Enter an email I received last Friday…
“Do you or any of your clients have a Twitter page which you can’t be bothered/don’t have time to update on a daily basis? How would a custom industry news feed which automatically updates the Twitter account by the minute using 100k + News sources including small regional publications, trade press, nationals, Council websites etc. These can then be filtered and tailored exactly around your own needs for example Gordon Brown/ Nottinghamshire/ NHS/ funding/ IT. This is an idea I’m banding about and wondered if it would interest anyone as I’ve used it on our site which has produced some excellent results.”
On first glance, it looks a truly awful idea. But on second glance, well…it IS a truly awful idea. Totally ignoring the “can’t be bothered to update” line (*sigh*), it displays a total lack of understanding of what Twitter is and how it works. The concept of broadcasting a huge amount of unedited, duplicate content over which you have no control does nothing more than add to the ‘noise’ on Twitter. It is, in effect, spamming the very followers who you supposedly value – it offers no original opinion, thought or insight and it doesn’t enrich their lives. And what about ‘the conversation’?
So, intrigued and in despair, I did a bit of digging. The company responsible for this new tool claims that “media monitoring is our field of expertise” and that its “followers have increased dramatically since the feed was introduced”. So I took a look at its Twitter profile. After this “dramatic increase” due to the magical tool, it currently has the remarkable total of 559 followers. And yet it follows 1470 people. It virtually never @replies to anyone and, at the time of writing, it has broadcast no less than 18 tweets in the last five hours, with topics as varied as Greek fiscal woes, Indian Premier League cricket, the General Election and (my favourite) Beyonce’s swimsuit malfunction.
So basically, this custom tool results in a page that has no focus whatsoever, doesn’t engage people and has a remarkably poor follow-back rate. Purely out of curiosity, I ran a Twitalyzer analysis on the profile: Engagement 0.0%, Influence 0.0%, Generosity 0.0% and Clout 0.0%. Not quite the “excellent results” I was led to believe it would produce from the original email, then!
I’ve managed to write this post without once mentioning the company in question. But what the hell, for an example of how NOT to manage a Twitter profile, visit www.twitter.com/Updatum.
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