Loading ...Just curious – I’m wondering how many of you still find Twitter to be as interesting and awesome as you used to find it.
For newer Twits, it may very well be. For those of us who were “early adopters”, we’ve got clearly different experiences. I remember Twitter before every television show and celebrity and news station had a Twitter account. Before every business went to crazy lengths to get followers. And before it became a place over-run with teenagers Tweeting about crazy sexual stuff. I remember when it was truly a networking place between colleagues, old and new. It was fun to go and see what some of the people I look up to in my field were reading or writing or talking about.
My personal feeling? There’s lots of clutter in Twitter these days. People who follow you in hopes of you following them back so they can increase their follower count, only to unfollow you if you don’t reciprocate, or once they’ve got you following them.
What do you think? Vote, and then discuss your answer in the comments!
@Vingeviciute
From the very start of using Twitter, I looked at it as a source of news,because I think facebook is better for social networking among friens and collegues.Though I’m not big fan of Facebook.
After almost 1700 tweets I can say,that I don’t like the inflation of followers numbers the most.I never follow back people that I’m not interested in. I know that I won’t get more followers too, if I won’t follow,but so often it’s too obvious that somebody starts following you just to add another number to their own followers .
I don’t like gaining followers in packages as some sites suggest either.
I also think that Twitter is overrated as a marketing tool,because if you can artificialy increase numbers of your followers,that means that your marketing outreach results can be very murky.
But I found many interesting people on Twitter and I follow them and I’m glad they follow me. And I still find Twitter to be a very good source of news an ideas.
@tomindesert
Although I look at Twitter daily, I find it confusing and hard to navigate. I have never been able to find my own Tweets in a search and its beyond me what purpose hashtags serve when, again, you can’t even find your own stuff.
I think Twitter certainly has potential, but it still has a long way to go before I can consider it as a viable personal or business tool.
@astateofmind
As long as I’m using Tweetdeck I have no problems and it’s useful, even more useful than 2 years ago
@SuccessBooks
I absolutely adore Twitter. I have made many excellent contacts and I see more and more authors tweeting. They are so appreciative when I post descriptions and reviews of their books.
Twitter is my number one source for discovering what’s going on in the wild, wacky world of book publishing and it’s rare that i don’t learn something new and informative about this field.
I am, however, totally exasperated by the plethora of multi-level and affiliate marketers promising to show me how to make millions and those selling programs guaranteed to increase my followers. They should all be burned at the stake (a virtual one, of course).
I also have found that the DM’s (direct messages) are virtually useless with the auto-welcome tweets, those invitations to join various games, and those quizzes that state “I just took this what kind of flower are you quiz and found out I’m a Tulip” – a complete waste of time that only adds clutter, in my opinion.
Overall, I consider Twitter a keeper.
@FantasyClay
I used Twiiter since about 2008. It’s changed and there are more users. But the rules haven’t changed, you can follow those you want, block spammers. I only follow those who interest me. If they spam me with ads or junk, I unfollow. I’m there for the company, not publicity.
@ryanbiddulph
Twitter has been a goldmine for me. I decide to fliter through the “noise” to get the value, which twitter still provides.
The key is to know who you’re following. If they’re not for you, block ‘em. This ensures that they’ll never follow you again and keeps your stream clean.
@Gordon_Wood
Twitter is getting too cluttered and way too hard read anything without great effort. There are also a lot of concerns about manipulation and account control.
Through casual network collaboration I have make some genuine friends on twitter that I would hate to lose. Like yahoo was in the early days, where I still have many longstanding friendships over 15 years, I have some similar value in twitter.
But many have concerns with the potential to get banned for. People who have build up person friends should add them to face book or an alternative. I actually don’t trust twitter a lot for this reason.
Many experiment with tools to get following including commercial communities who are using it for marketing. These have blanket un-follow functions designed to help keep ratios balanced to meet twitter rules. When I use them it is annoying when someone I want to follow without ever expecting them to follow gets flicked. Aggressive is also undefined and difficult to self monitor. E.g. spending time searching for a group of likeminded people and systematically following them. I only have so much time in a week so I do it all in one go.
And to give some anonymous twitter administrator capricious power or their management the right to change a policy and cut me off would be an unacceptable risk I should not take.
In my case I use the medium to both communicate and publish my blog, which is non commercial and aimed to help people learning about business. Twitter gives me access to a large audience to corroborate my material with and who also have viral potential propagate what I publish. Without twitter I would not have this. Sadly if I get banned it would also mean those who rely on it to get notified of my updates will be lost in a second
So being quite wary now especially as my account has seemed some strange behavior at times. On one occasion it was down for several days (just me) which made me think I had been banned. I wasn’t but it was there was nowhere to go to get help. Thankfully it came back but minus 1000 or so followers.
The concern is investing more time to build it up the value of this two way network of followers.
And consider the possibility that someone wanted to disable a competitor in business and somehow hacked their account then spammed from it intensely so it got banned. With no recourse it would fatal.
Does someone have an app that could collect and store all my twitter account followings and the underlying information, then easily be reconstituted and have followers switch automatically when twitter fails me?
I am not sure I am not alone with these concerns plus like you say in your post people are getting quite cynical of social networks value anyway.
Although I still tweet and interact a lot I have stopped following on twitter and just let it grow organically as it wants to. It has also given me back a life.
@Gaelen2
I had the same discussion with my brother a couple weeks ago – he claims Twitter needs to completely reinvent itself to stay interesting. I disagree; Twitter ‘reinvents’ itself every time the stream updates.
Follow carefully, keep your follower list free of clutter and spammers, and interact with people – that’s Twitter for me. It’s been just over a year for me, and I’ve found or made many friends in various subject areas on Twitter. My only regret these days is that I’m so slammed at work that my tweeting time is limited to 5 or 6 stolen minutes in the morning or at night. I kinda miss having the flexibility to ‘pop in’ to the discussion stream in the middle of the day.
@bloggingbistro
I continue to share and gain ideas via Twitter — it has been a tremendous source of new connections (and clients) for my social media marketing business.
The key for me has been manually vetting new followers and deciding whether I want to follow them in return. It takes time, but following only the people I most enjoy interacting with and learning from, keeps Twitter relevant for me.
@bradshorr
Hi Lara, For the last few months it seems like Facebook has been social media platform of the moment, at least for small and mid sized companies. Within my own Twitter community, I guess I’ve noticed a loss of enthusiasm – less FollowFriday activity, people who were regularly on Twitter disappearing for weeks at a time, stuff like that. But it hasn’t fallen off a cliff. There’s still plenty of activity, lots of tremendously helpful information being shared, new people jumping in.
@elizbeskin
I actually agree with you about being an early adopter-i am growing tired of spending lots of time on twitter. there are only so many hours in the day
tweetdeck certainly makes it easier to keep track of important conversations-but the fascination is definitely fading-sadly
@virtuosblogger
Twitter has changed a lot in these years, First the conversation was very high, links were less. But now links are more, conversation is less
@kelvinringold
Absolutely, Twitter is still awesome. You get out of it (in my opinion) what you put in it. I’ve met information sources, life-long friends, confidants, teachers and mentors, and business partners. My focus is not numbers, per se, but quality contacts. Not every one who follows me is a quality contact and I’m sure some people I follow don’t consider me to be a quality contact for them. My feeling is that “birds of a feather tweet together”. You can tailor twitter to do / be what you want it to do / be. I have found, however, that it is important to know what you want from it. Like any other goal, if you don’t know what you want from it, you won’t likely figure out how to get it.
@CazMinx
I find myself not using Twitter as much as I used to, but that is probably true of all of my social media sites at the moment. I think that is more a reflection of my priorities, too busy and too tired to Tweet as often. I am still on their every day.
I think I am lucky because not a lot of my friends have embraced Twitter so I don’t have 8000 people tweeting useless crap in my feed everyday. The good thing about Twitter as opposed to Facebook etc is the fact that you don’t have to follow someone back and that if you have your Tweets on private and someone requests to follow you and you reject it, they have no way of contacting you on their to whine about “whhhhhhy didn’t you accept”.
I think Twitter is still awesome for that reason in particular, it is still my favourite social networking site.
It’s so interesting to read everyone’s different takes on the current state of Twitter. Thank you all for your comments!
Hi, Brad!
I do agree that it seems facebook and twitter go back and forth sometimes wearing the crown. Personally, I recently took after Darren and made my facebook profile for “friend” contacts and created a page for business contacts. I’m liking that arrangement thus far.
@manamica
I agree with something everyone has said on here, so I feel like a dummy still commenting after seeing all the good thoughts. I find Twitter still pretty awesome, except on Follow Fridays and Wonder Women Wednesday etc. I absolutely love the friendliness of folks on Twitter and I want to see and hear who is appreciated but these two trends are becoming just spam that drowns out the rest of the conversation.
I think the introduction of lists combined with apps that allowed me to watch favorite lists saved the Twitter experience for me. But as more and more get hungry for more followers I notice increased spammy behavior. So now I’m waiting for Twitter to issue advanced lists options where I can exclude certain hash tags or key words from lists.
@berget
Twitter is still awesome. I agree that there are a lot of clutter, and people that are following other people in order to get more followers. And there are a lot of spammers out there as well.
But the great thing about Twitter is that it’s easy to filter and have conversations with the people you really want to be having the conversations with
@iamkrissy
I find Twitter as useful as I’ve always found it, and I consider myself somewhat of an “early adopter,” starting in 2008, anyway. Twitter is what you make of it. If you are selective of who you choose to follow, not following spammers, and following those you have mutual interests with, you won’t find a bunch of clutter in your stream, and twitter will be as useful as always. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying be so choosy that you follow almost no one and that your follow to following ratio is out of whack — I think that makes one look pompous. But nobody can make you follow more people than you choose, and you need to make your selections carefully. This includes NOT autofollowing. This of course is your personal choice, but I have never autofollowed, and I have over 3,000 followers and am following over 3,000 people. My network is a close network of extreme value in my opinion and I know many of my friends (we are mutual followers) well. I know them well and they know me well bc we took a long time to follow each other and get to know each other. We did not just autofollow and amass quickly, before being able to get to know each other. We added value to one another’s lives, in the time it took to follow each other. I would never autofollow (so I believe now anyway!) as it would add spam to my stream, and make my strea meaningless. Some say this is the wrong way to do things, and it would insult a lot of people, especially if there are a lot of people who want to become your followers quickly. I say anyone that wants to network with me must wait their turn for me to answer them back, after I review their invitation, just as I must wait my turn, while they review me! If they can’t wait their turn, they can leave! This is what makes a good stream and a good network! I know there are those who say it is preferrable to add everybody immediately, even porn stars and spammers immediately, EVERYBODY, and then just weed out real perverts or spammers later as you find them. But I won’t do that. There would be too much trash in my stream, and just too much info I would not be interested in, and people I could not relate to, and I wouldn’t want to network with, that using twitter would be a waste of my time. So this is how I handle the situation. It works perfectly. I hope this explanation helped somebody! krissy knox
@2009Taxes
I used to get a lot more traffic from Twitter than I do today even with the number of followers greatly increased.
I Soooo Love Twitter, I Follow Every One xxxx
little-yellow-penguins@hotmail.co.uk —- ADD ME PLEASE I WANT MORE FRIENDS
I NEED A NEW BOYFRIEND, IM VERY CONFIDIENT..
I LOVE SEX !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ADD ME IF YOU LIKE
little-yellow-penguins@hotmail.co.uk