TROUBLE WITH TWITTER

We have all been bombarded with Twitter. Do you Twit? Are you a Tweeter? Boy I just did an awesome Tweet. It’s to the point that if you don’t tweet your every movement, then someone will miss something. Miss what?  Not sure. Maybe that your gong to the store to get bread? Do I really care that Kim Kardashian is backstage at some bobble head toy convention? Or that Chad  Ochocinco was fined $50k for tweeting in the locker room.

It is amazing how this one program has taken off and invaded the blogosphere. How many Tweeter followers to you have? I myself have been paying lots of attention lately to building up my Twitter following and I am coming close to ten thousand followers.

Why do 10,000 people even want to follow me? I try and give funny tweets, or interesting ones. But the fact is, I am pretty boring and so are the 10,000 people that probably follow me, OK maybe one or two lead an interesting life. But is it something, that I myself really truly care about. Nope. Not really.

I don’t want to knock the Twitter Nation to much,  they have been good to me. More and more advertisers are paying attention to the incredible following that Tweeter has built up and in doing so, they have a program now that is called Sponsored Tweets. Basically what it does, it allows advertisers to pick certain Twitters to tweet a 140 character mini ad.

For instance. I just got to tweet the other day on a soap detergent and if you go to this site you get a free sample of their new improved laundry soap. I myself can not believe that a company like a Proctor and Gamble is making sure all these people are aware of their new improved soap. And honestly I bet they got a shitload of people to go to their site and gave away tons of free samples.

So now if your a large corporation or even a small company, you have to consider where to spend your advertising dollar. Before it was pretty simple, there was 3 or 4 major advertising mediums. Let’s see TV, radio, print media (newspapers, magazines) and a billboard here and there.

Now you can Tweet,  put an ad on a website, place an ad with Google and pay every time someone clicks on your ad. You can watch TV now on the web, so more and more people do that instead of TV. Why? Because they can watch it when they want to, not when the show happens to be one. But it gives advertisers yet another medium to sponsor yet another ad.

The breakdown of what is Tweeted is as follows:*

• News
• Spam
• Self-promotion
• Pointless babble
• Conversational
• Pass-along value

“Pointless babble” was the largest category of Twitter content. Hell I think any of us could have figured out that one. How can anyone possibly follow so many people and answer them? Or even read everyone of them. I looked at my Twitter account the other day and I was Tweeting something and within one minute after I Tweeted it, there were 295 new Tweets, just from my followers. Damn if I could read that many in a minute, let alone as soon as I read them, I would have had another 2000 more to read and so on and so on.

You would tend to believe that the Twitter main users are younger people , which by most standards are probably correct. I am in my 50′s and I Tweet everyday now, as do most anyone who owns a blog or website. When the Prez gave the State Of The Union Speech, there were members of congress that were, yup Twittering.

Whether we like it or not, Twitter is here to stay in one form or another. Those ubiquitous 140 character micro blurbs will continue to grow. Twitter is in the top 50 websites in the world. Hell they might even be in the top 25 by now.

For the 6 of you who don’t use Twitter here’s a cartoon I found to be quite amusing and maybe will help you understand, ah I think, well maybe not. Hell I am not even sure I understand Twitter.

The one thing I do know, everyday  there is a new app built for Twitter users. Maybe they can invent a new app that will automatically Tweet your grocery list to the market and have it delivered for you, thus saving you time having to go shopping.

Now that is an app I would surely use!!!

*statistics from Pear Analytics

Related articles by Zemanta

• Sponsored Tweets (momblognetwork.com)
• I Still Can’t Believe Someone Actually Pays Me To Tweet (doozielife.com)
• Twitter to Launch Ad Platform Soon (gigaom.com)

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Posted by Glenn on Feb 26 2010 Filed under FEATURES, FUNNY, PICTURES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry