Back to Twitter

Both LinkedIn and Twitter confuse me. Each has a useful social media monopoly but each also seems to have no idea as to what to do next.

In the case of LinkedIn it’s pretty obvious what they should do, so there must be some pretty retarded senior management down there at head office.

For Twitter though I can see that figuring out a viable future must be quite hard.

Overnight my Twitter account had been followed by hundreds of Arabic speaking people many of whom have 250k “followers”.

And the incoming followers aren’t stopping any time soon; probably this is driven by some third party bot.

Now my Twitter account has one purpose; as a beacon for my WordPress blog. I can tell how many of my Twitter followers are real based upon my WordPress stats. Say 1 in a 100 and heading south with the middle eastern influx.

The take home answer is that Twitter has a problem. There are hundreds of millions of people ignoring each other’s Tweets but staying in the system so they can attract more fake followers.

There will be a tipping point where the system will suddenly be subject to ridicule. And it will go the way of MySpace.

My advice to them is to track the reading of tweets and divide the followers up into “readers” and “collectors”.

People simply want some clarity as to the true interest in their ramblings. And without this the home publishers have a hard time monetising their efforts.