Twitter—Jumped the Shark Already?

fail whale

I have made money from Twitter. I have a book deal that is the direct result of my involvement in social media—not a book about social media, mind you, but a book about management and career development, which is what I actually do for a living. I have a product that has generated thousands of dollars in revenue and which is being reviewed by major, well respected institutions, with zero marketing other than the occasional blog post and tweet. So I should love Twitter, right? After all, I’ve actually done what all these so-called social media experts say they can teach you to do.

Unfortunately, I think Twitter has “jumped the shark.” That is, I think its value is being eroded faster than it is being created. But that might change again, and that possibility creates a dilemma for companies who want to use it.

What’s a company to do?

Using my own experiences, let’s walk through the promise of Twitter, the issues and reality of Twitter, and how I use it and other forms of social media:

First, the promise: Twitter is another form of communication. Like newspaper, billboards, radio, TV, browser, and IM clients, Twitter provides a way to share messages with others. If indeed Twitter is like any of these other forms of communication channels, that is. If it’s more like the bullhorn, satellite phone, or MySpace, it’s on it’s way to a fast mass-market retreat once the novelty wears off, destined for use for quick broadcast messages to pre-defined clusters of indivdiuals.

Second, the issues: The “who gives a squat” factor on Twitter is tremendous. I tweeted about having dinner with several other popular social media darlings last night. I did it for a group of about 50-60 of my followers who I knew would care; that meant about 1,640 people got a message that they didn’t care about. Of course, most of them probably never noticed my tweet, because of the next issue: many Tweeple are in a mad race for the most followers, making the tool nearly unusable.

When I followed and was followed by about 500-600 people, Twitter was great: the “timeline” of updates was nearly always manageable (of those 500, not all of them would be tweeting at once), there was a sense of community because I had a sense for who these people were and who knew whom, and I had time to do a bit of research on them when I didn’t. When I sent out blog updates, people responded. Now, however, with another 1,000 followers or so, it’s already a different world: fewer people click on my links. Recently, I threw a question out to the world via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and my blog. I received zero responses through Twitter.

Zero.

1,500 followers at the time, and zero responses. By contrast, I sent the note out to about 300 people with whom I’m connected on LinkedIn and had a response rate of about 8%. Plus, I had a handful of people who answered the question who didn’t receive an email. Now, it’s not quite an apples-to-apples comparison, but the point is, for getting others to engage, Twitter utterly failed me. All those connections I had made, when I went to move them up a notch in the engagement ladder, proved to be worthless. What’s worse, all those tweeple just in it for the links are creating noise in the system: whereas once upon a time, I knew DMs (private messages) were guaranteed to be spam-free, not so anymore. And as with phone calls and emails, it’s sometimes difficult to discern the legitimate requests from the pure spam. (People, on the whole, aren’t great communicators.)

My actual community of people I connect with on Twitter is no longer expanding… at least, not nearly as quickly as it was. And a quick look at my followers shows why: many of them follow 000′s and 000′s of people… which means their timelines are a blazing fast waterfall of random. It also means they themselves don’t care about the content: they’re in it for the #s, not the links. A quick perusal of their names shows many of them to be consultants, companies, and others with something to sell. You think they’re reading my stuff? No, me neither.

Which brings us to the reality of Twitter. For me, it’s becoming sort of a “poor man’s Digg with private and semi-private messaging capabilities.” I still use it—I post links, occasionally comment on what’s happening (though not as much since I continuously see a drop off in my followers when I do that), and use the semi- and private @ and DM features to connect with actual friends. Most of my tweets are links back to my blog—it’s simply too difficult to make new friends now. Actually, I take that back: it’s no more difficult now to make friends via Twitter than it was early on; the challenge is still getting someone’s attention. What makes it seem more difficult is the sheer volume of possibilities, laid atop the fact that I’m already spending as much time with social media as I care to spend—life does go on, you know, much of it in the physical world, and some of it on Facebook and LinkedIn, too.

So what does my future hold? More tweeting, yes. I want to see what direction Twitter goes—what new functionality they roll out, whether they get their servers fixed, etc. Like I said at the beginning, I have actually made money and expanded my business through Twitter, so I’m not so ready to abandon the experiment; I’ve actually had a taste of the value. But it’s clear to me that this is very much an experiment, and I’m hedging my bet accordingly. I’m getting more precise about what I tweet in order to make Google’s index of old tweets work for me. I’m cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook to see which updates generate more views; I’m exploring groups and other functionality on LinkedIn; I video blog; I use RSS feeds to push content out and read what else is going on in the world; I have a podcast that will be starting soon; and, I’m continuing to expand my online reach directly through the blogosphere by connecting with other sites and sharing content with them, as well.

What should you do? It depends on where you are and what you want. The social media experiment is clearly not yet over.  Twitter, the insta-darling of 2008 and 2009, may already be showing signs it might be the next Pets.com, but it hasn’t failed yet. And in the broader context, Twitter is but one of a handful of powerful social media tools, including the sites mentioned above as well as a number of others. Best of all, even with all the problems, the online medium is cheap. If you’re large enough to have a marketing budget, devote some of it to “online.” Don’t necessarily split out social media, though; I’m finding that social media works best a part of an integrated program—especially given its experimental nature.

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Tagged as: social media, twitter