Twitter — The Double-Edged Social Sword!

I’m sure every­one has got an account, or at least heard about this so called ‘rev­o­lu­tion­ary’ social-media net­work — Twit­ter.

It’s been 3 years since it was released to the pub­lic — yet so many blog­gers and tweet­ers alike are like still talk­ing about it, as if it just came out yesterday.

Every­thing from affil­i­ate adver­tis­ing to the num­ber of tea­spoons of sugar you had in your cup of cof­fee this morn­ing is dis­cussed on Twit­ter. So, why is this the double-edged social sword?

I remem­ber read­ing an arti­cle a few months ago, that played a pun on a famous say­ing — and it went  “Did Twit­ter kill the blog­ging star?” The title in itself was enough to grab my atten­tion (just shows how impor­tant catchy titles are!) and that made me com­pelled to read the arti­cle. In fact, I think it’s an extremely wor­thy read for any social-media activist! After you read it, maybe my post here will make a bit more sense.

We know Twit­ter to be as a social-network tool, where you can catch up with your friends or even strangers on the inter­net — and get the chance to tell them every sin­gle lit­tle thing your doing. That’s all nice and well till you start actu­ally read­ing some of the tweets and you feel that most of the peo­ple you are fol­low­ing are usu­ally talk­ing to themselves.

Nat­u­rally, if you are an iconic fig­ure and have 1,000s upon 1,000s of fol­low­ers — there’s bound to be stalk­ers await­ing to reply to your tweets. Apart from the big timers, let’s take a look at the aver­age Tweeter, with a mod­er­ately strong social net­work built on Twit­ter. With about 100 – 500 peo­ple fol­low­ing their tweets, you would assume they are ‘pretty suc­cess­ful’ in this social-media? WRONG!

These ‘suc­cess­ful’ Tweet­ers, which are by far many, seems to be talk­ing to them­selves! Clus­tered in a bunch of other tweets — I would see a stranded user tweet the occa­sional “I’m going to sleep” or “I“m hav­ing break­fast”. Now, this is the true sense of Twit­ter and the pur­pose of it.

Unfor­tu­nately, today most web-savvy surfers use it as a mar­ket­ing tool. This is all well, till we get spam­mers. Just bear in mind that spam­mers can take many forms from “life­less sever­ity” to “occa­sional adver­tiser.” I would say most users on Twit­ter are lit­er­ally obsessed with the fact you can get nearly instant response to your lasted arti­cle posted on your blog.

Mak­ing a Twit­ter account on the sole pur­pose of cre­at­ing a social net­work can quickly steer of course, when you seem to talk to your­self. We obvi­ously can decide who we fol­low, and who we decide to un-follow later on, but you can’t help but feel a  sense of sep­a­ra­tion amongst Tweet­ers that just don’t seem to get any replies. Thus, destroy­ing the whole “social” aspect of it.

There’s only one way to com­bat this ‘Twit­ter Down­fall’, and that is to be very selec­tive on whom you fol­low. DON’T fol­low every Tom, Dick and Harry you see — hop­ing they will fol­low you! The idea is to build a true-community where sta­tis­tics don’t reflect upon quality.

Try this for a change, unfol­low all the spam­mers and mar­keters — then start actu­ally talk­ing to your fol­low­ers. Then maybe, just mabye, you might cap­ture the true essence of Twit­ter and reap it’s glo­ri­ous potential!

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