Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Oh, and Twitter.

Aren’t you sick of it yet?

I’ve avoided this post for a while now, because I didn’t want to offend anyone.  Read on though, because I don’t hate Twitter. I’m just frustrated with some of it’s users.

Online Social Interaction

It started about ten years ago with online journals. For the most part, someone would write about their personal life and a small group of friends would keep up with each other’s journals. These pretty much fizzled out about five years later when everyone realized their life wasn’t all that exciting and no one actually cared to read about them.

The death of the online journal was quickly revived and renamed, however. Blogging was popularized. The difference? Not really anything, except blogs were accepted territory for non-personal communication as well as the same old boring personal diaries.

Blogging will surely have a much longer lifespan. It encompasses so much ground (personal diaries, company news, online magazines, professional journalists, etc.) that the death of blogging won’t be because people get tired of it, but because it gets renamed. The tension between professional journalists and amateur newsies will cause some sort of split and renaming of each vehicle of media.

So blogging hasn’t even died and now we have micro-blogging — the pesterous, constant updates about people’s unexciting lives. At least, that’s what it started as. Now, it’s pesterous, constant spam with the unexciting personal updates mixed in.

Find out how many people are “eating hot dogs“. Who cares?

Why Twitter Sucks

90% of the users are marketing & PR “experts”. Haven’t you noticed that it seems like everyone is a marketeer with a blog (which just so happens to be posts all about Twitter)? I don’t want to generalize though — there are plenty of people out there that have nothing to do with marketing and there are a few bonafide experts.

In reality, it’s a pool of mediocrity. Twitter gives everyone a platform. For the marketeers that don’t really know anything about marketing, they can create a Twitter account and get a ton of followers. There’s something tangible they did and they claim to have done it with some sort of Twitter insider knowledge. The question remaining is: did you actually popularize a product or service?

What in the world is the point of following 1,000 people? I use the music site lala.com and you can follow people to see what they’re listening to. Now, if I followed hundreds of people they probably wouldn’t be listening to what I like and how could I even keep up with what they’re listening to? Instead, I follow just a handful of people with music tastes that I like. The same goes for Twitter: if you have hundreds of people you’re following then you have a low quality stream of updates and what’s the point?

Why Twitter CAN Be Great

With all of the crap I just dropped on Twitter, there’s still some light shining through.

News. Some really interesting news has been recorded because of instant mobile access to Twitter.

The right kind of marketing. Because people are going to use Twitter no matter what, there are some things that can be done well to market to them: exclusive Twitter coupons/promo codes, contests, integration with offline campaigns. Notice, these examples don’t include anything that would require updating your account 100 times a day or even gaining followers.

That’s about it all the good I see in Twitter. I don’t care if you are pooping, going to sleep, or hate your boss.

I’m Guilty

I didn’t get this frustrated sitting on the sidelines. I was a part of the mess for a while.

I actually used Twitter primarily to promote my non-profit website giveaway and it worked wonders. You can see why though. I was doing something nice and giving something free.

So, maybe this’ll be a wakeup call for some.

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