The Twitter Game

On any given day I receive about 30 new followers on twitter. This would add up to about 900 new followers over the past month and yet when I check my twitter account the real number has only increased by about 60.

The reason why is that I don’t follow back unless I know the person. You know what I mean – somebody follows you and then you are supposed to follow them back. Ultimately everybody then brags of the fact that they have 30,000 followers.

Are you impressed when you see someone with 30,000 followers? I’m not if it turns out they are following just as many. In reality nobody is really following anyone and the whole thing is a charade. If anyone is following more than a few hundred people then it is a joke. How could you follow more than a few people? And why would you want to?

I am aware that many of my readers are playing the Twitter game and I don’t want to dump in your cornflakes unfairly but would any of you like to tell me what the point is? Are any of you actually seeing results either monetarily or some other way. I’m trying to keep an open mind and would really like to know if I am missing the boat here.

I posted about Monster Energy Drinks on my other blog a few days ago in order to help a friend rank in the serp’s for Monster Energy Drinks, also to show that SEO really is just “getting targeted anchored keyword backlinks”, that you don’t have to post on topic, backlinks don’t have to be from relevant sites to help and finally to check out what effect twitter and facebook would have on getting attention to what was clearly a social type post.

Given I have 800 followers I assumed then that the post would be read and perhaps re-tweeted by 800 followers… Ok – maybe a FEW would be washing their cat and miss the tweet but that would still leave 750 ish to get the word out… OK maybe a few more don’t actually see twits (like me) because they (like me) have no way of knowing if a friend has just twitted something… and they (like me) couldn’t find an instruction manual on twitter explaining exactly how we are supposed to know when a friend has twitted something as earth shattering as my post was… and they (like me) refuse to actually spend more than 2 seconds trying to find an answer to this problem… so that would still leave about 2 people who do read my twits because they are brilliant and/or just happened to be on twitter when my twit popped up and they promptly re-twitted it to their 30,000 followers who were washing their cats and that is about where it died a most un-viral death.

So that’s my take on the Twitter thing. It is useful for searching for stuff though and if they get their act together they could cause Google some grief and I did find it useful for letting Blogger know last week that Blogspot.com was down in my region and unbelievably 1) Google/Blogger didn’t know it till I twitted them, 2) They promptly fixed the problem, 3) A Google/Blogger employee actually got back to me on Twitter lickety split – YES WAY! When has anybody from G ever responded to anyone ever?

So twitter has some uses but just wondering if any of you are making coin from it or are you just using it to spam crap to thousands of followers who are busy washing cats? Like this guy…

Please share – I really would like to know without spending more than 2 seconds trying to learn on my own.

Cheers,

Griz

Btw – how come every time I want to twit something as important as this post – (I know my 800 followers are waiting for it on the edge of their seats) I get this…

1. Lawrence S. Miller says:

   December 23, 2009 at 10:26 am

   I am a little late to this Twitter conversation, but here goes my less than 140 characters on that subject.

   I am on Twitter but that is about it. I must be missing something. Is anyone here excited about the Twitter experience?

   Reply
2. Unconventional Marketing Ideas Blog - Learn Marketing Ideas | Marketing Strategy | Marketing Techniques from Fargo, ND Step by Step Guide on How to Make Money With Twitter : says:

   December 23, 2009 at 5:24 pm

   [...] the wrongs or rights of the different Twitter marketing ideas presented here or how to play the Twitter game. To each their [...]

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4. Norris Hickinbotham says:

   February 19, 2010 at 3:33 pm

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   Reply