Twitter Quitters

A news blip today on the cultural radar screen reveals a statistic that shows that a lot of folks – 60%, I believe – try Twitter then don’t come back. This doesn’t surprise me at all, and I believe it has to do with the unforeseen use that people would make of this new social networking tool.

I wrote in an earlier post about celebrity narcissistic Tweeting, if we may call it that. This is the phenomena when some celebrity giant garners 6 million followers just based on their fame, and in turn responds by following 12 people. A Twitter rule of etiquette is to “return the follow” and follow those who follow you. Well, obviously John Mayer can’t follow the 798,000 people who follow him. He’d be buried in tweets. When you follow someone, Twitter allows them to tweet you directly. A “direct message”. They would receive literally thousands. In fact, it's kind of funny that even though these guys have hundreds of thousands of followers, they can only find a couple dozen people to follow themselves. I mean, if we're really talking about social networking, do any of us have a network of hundreds of people that we communicate with dozens of times a day? Still, I admire the celebrities that at least bother to follow some of their vast throng of followers (Paula Poundstone). And, Katy Perry, it wouldn't kill you to follow 20 people, you know? It's not like you're giving them your phone number. You can even block followers. But if it's avoiding the followers while being followed, is this really what Twitterr is all about?

So, my conclusion in that blog is that it’s really not a conversation within a social networking system, but more of a celebrity billboard. With all the free marketing that Twitter is allowing these celebrities to garner, I'm surprised they aren't considering charging them for the service based on a per follower rate.

Well, my guess is that these 60% folks join, and if they follow celebrities, they’ll read all sorts of posts. If they join only to connect with their friends, associates, and family, they probably had 3 follows and 2 followers. Not much fun. A whole lot of folks are using tactics and tools to gain followers, for narcissistic reasons, or, more likely, to market something (most of my followers are trying to sell me something. Ironically, some are trying to sell me tips and tricks to gain more followers. Something strange about that.)

Twitter is not becoming a social networking app. It’s becoming a celebrity reflection pond. I would love to see some statistics of number of tweets distributed across users. Or more importantly, number of followers of celebrities vs. regular joes. I’m sure the system is awfully top-heavy with celeb tweets. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s kind of fun to follow some of them. But if you actually think you’re doing social networking with them, well, you’re probably destined for the 60% bin.

Later.