So far for me there's a single big use-case for twitter, and it's the reason I went from a zero-tweeter to a "gee I should look like a normal, respectable upstanding Twitizen(?)[1]" user. For some very large companies, Twitter is apparently the best/only medium one can use to communicate with them about issues (regardless of how important they are).
I've found that when I don't want a response I can file a bug report or send an email. When I do I can publicly whine on twitter and @-someone.
It sorta feels bad to do but it really does work.
The use case I'd like to use twitter for is trying out some jokes/"deep thoughts", but I don't have enough followers so I just tweet them to the wind and I'll never how just how unfunny I really am. I can definitely understand why most people would use it as a follow-only service - it's somewhat depressing to knowingly broadcast to (almost) nobody.
[1] Wow that's been a word for at least five years. I guess that's not too surprising...
The problem with only using Twitter for customer support purposes is it reflects poorly on your online identity. Twitter's profiles will rank pretty high in Google and if everything that comes up is you looking to resolve something (even if they are legitimate concerns with companies where you weren't at fault), it comes across as a one sided use of the medium.
You also describe the usual chicken and egg problem any social medium involves. Nobody will follow you without interesting content and if you have no followers, you're less inclined to spend time posting it. Break out of that cycle by spending a limited amount of time on our tweets first. Make mistakes and figure out your voice while you don't have a bunch of followers yet. See if the 140 character limit works for you e.g.. Find value in the process of coming up with the content in the first place. If you still enjoy that, then you're well equipped for a larger following.
For some but I find them super hard to use well and remain funny (funny to me at least). Lame example of hashtag use:
> #baseball combines the two things Americans love most: Perfect lawns and arguments in hindsight about the decisions that professionals make.
I wrote this, but think it's funnier without the hashtag.
With many more I can think of things that I considered really funny, but had no conceivable way of adding hashtags without taking away from the brevity:
> I propose we start calling snow plow guys "Storm Troopers"
> The first stage of grief is learning to pronounce the disease.
Where could I hashtag those up without making them considerably less funny? I think the brevity is required for maximum "impact", and I don't wanna detract by putting a hashtag in the middle, because its the sentence equivalent of stressing a syllable awkwardly.
Some people on Twitter have turned this awkward word-stressing into an art. Comedian Rob Delaney comes to mind as an expert in maximizing the awkwardness of it.
That is how twitter jokes look. It is part and parcel of the medium. Better to have the joke look like a twitter joke and get read by an audience, than to make it pure and read by nobody. Really, the hashtags are no more out of place than a smiley face on an email.
I don't use Twitter, but based on what I see on Instagram, I agree with the parent that those people look like asses. It comes off as whoring for followers, and a bit desperate.
I think it's different, however, if there are a few hashtags at the end which in themselves are jokes or metajokes and that add to the cleverness of the post, in the same way that XKCD alt-text does. A string of simple categories (#joke #jokes #funny #comedy) is just annoying.
And yet, many popular users do exactly that. I'm a huge proponent of keeping metadata, which is what hashtags are, out of the data. It sucks but, making your message "discoverable" pollutes your message.
In the last month/years, I've noticed that a good number of companies where I live (mostly ISPs) have started to offer official support over Twitter/Facebook. It's usually the only way to get some decent support, as the choice is between social networks and call centers - and for most of those companies, their call centers are outsourced out of the contry, full of people that barely understand/talk your language, and that don't really know anything about solving issues.
I've found this to be the case for me, whether it's going online to check if the game servers really are down, or to ask a question hoping for some quick feedback.
I rarely use Twitter, but I do see the value it provides to help businesses and customers connect.
Pretty much the same here. We recently flew to Portugal, and the easiest way to request a special meal from TAP Portugal was to ask them on twitter. The only other option was to call during business hours and wait on hold.
This is a really frustrating habit. It's basically demanding that you skip any support queues and get helped before everyone else, because you're airing your discontent publicly.
"Swearing at brands on twitter really is the new and awesome 'nuclear option' for receiving full-on customer support."
back when brands were first getting on twitter, and those of us with a few followers suddenly realize the huge power those brands had accidentally handed over. e.g. Cable internet companies that would normally jerk you around and put you on hold for hours, but one little slightly-swear-word-infused tweet and suddenly you get gold-plated service. Those days were awesome.
Being a nobody on twitter can be extremely frustrating if you're tweeting and expecting anyone to pay attention.
I have about 100 followers. I know most of those are probably spam bots. For the remaining, many are inactive. Others have thousands of followers (zero chance of reading anything I write). Tweeting feels like writing in a diary. Or shouting in an empty field. I'm not surprised users avoid tweeting.
There's kind of this cool aspect where you can just respond to anyone and feel involved in a highly visible conversation. But you quickly realize you have a good chance of seeming like a creep for butting into a conversation that, though public, is really intended to be among friends.
I'm one of those people, I rarely tweet. If I do it's usually aimed at one of my few followers (I think I have about 20) that are friends in my field.
Otherwise, I follow people that have more interesting things to say. It's how I know what's going on in the development world. I barely follow anyone outside of my field.
Although, funny thing happened once. I commented on someone's tweet pointing out a bit of hypocrisy and his defense was I didn't have enough followers to warrant being able to say anything in the first place. Apparently I'm in a popularity contest I didn't know I was in.
If you are tweeting and hoping someone to pay attention and no one is, I could understand the frustration.
I'm thinking of getting back into the habit of doing a tech blog that's more for me to keep tracks of the interesting tidbits of information and code I come up with doing my job. I guess that's a similar deal to your idea of tweeting as a diary.
This is a bit of a tangent but why allow spam bots to appear in your followers list? I too have about a hundred followers and I vet every single new follower. I take offense at any spammer that thinks they can just slip in there and be accepted, and I don't want potential new followers to look at my profile and see a bunch of obvious spammers.
This isn't a slight against you, we all budget our time for what's important to us and cultural norms vary. I'm just surprised when I see someone with a manageable number of followers and they allow spammers to join in. I check the profile, tweet history, and if it sets my bullshit detector off even slightly I block them and report them as spam.
You shouldn't waste any more time on spammers by spending it trying to vet your followers. They got to decide they wanted to follow you, but you're in control of the most precious thing we have: our time. Don't give then even 10 seconds that it takes to try and decide their worth. They don't deserve that power over you.
I've never looked at any person's Twitter account and judged them by how many likely spam bots they have. I assume spam bots follow people all the time and I don't hold it against them for becoming victims.
Hmmm, interesting. I just never considered that my responsibility. I'll think about doing that.
One problem with blocking bots is sometimes I really can't tell if they are bots. Bots often copy profile pictures, descriptions, and tweets from real users. Some real users tweet pretty cryptic stuff. And blocking feels like such a serious step; I wouldn't watch to risk false positives.
You are probably better at detecting bots than you think. The same way you can recognise phishing and spam due to spelling or syntax errors. If I get a new follower and the only contact they've made with me is via Twitter, and their tweets are totally odd or cryptic, they aren't adding to my experience so away they go.
I've only had one false positive I know of and it was one of my wife's friends. She had a profile picture of her teenage daughters and no tweet history. I thought 'what the hell is a teenage girl doing following me - guaranteed spammer' only to find out who it was the next day. I unblocked and no offense was taken and no harm done.
Still, I guess I'm a bit stricter than average and this is something that most people don't care about.
I think think the thing about Twitter is you essentially have to pretend you have a network to actually gain a network. You have to do the internet equivalent of putting yourself out there, because if someone gets to your profile and sees you have no tweets, they probably won't follow you. Its definitely a Catch-22 scenario, but things like retweeting and favoriting can help you build that network without doing stuff that feels too weird. Also using Twitter as a networking tool on top of real life is definitely helpful, as people you meet in real life will probably be more willing to engage with you on Twitter.
I have found that after a good blog post, I gain a new chunk of followers. But I blog and tweet so infrequently it ends up not mattering. I feel like the only way to get a real payoff on Twitter is to be extremely, hyper active on the internet.
My account is one of those 44%. I have nothing to say on Twitter, but having an account lets me follow the people that I want to. This still makes me an active user, though.
I'm even worse. I created a Twitter account a few years ago and immediately asked myself "why am I doing this?"
Logged out without sending a single tweet and never went back. I still get a few emails from them every month wondering what happened to me. Still can't figure out why I would need an account.
Yes, that's exactly my situation. On the outside it looks like you are not active, but actually you are regularly on twitter.
Unfortunately, there is no way to measure this case, except for counting the people you follow or the people who are following you. Then you could know whether that user is somewhat active.
Couldn't Twitter track how many times you "request" your feed? Although not perfect, I'm sure they could get an approximation of those users who are just "lurking". They could also track logins from the web side, and probably app usage.
This data wouldn't show on outside measurements (like in the article) but would help Twitter know who is active and not.
Twitter definitely could, and they can easily get a clear idea of how many of these 'zero tweet' accounts actually are active. However, Twitter have no reason to give this information out and there are not many ways for outsiders to discover this information.
I use Twitter to get news and updates from a few sources. And in this case, the headline is like saying the majority of newspaper readers have never written a newspaper article.
That's a great analogy and highlights what might be a core issue for Twitter: what it wants to be (an social network with lots of two-sided interaction) vs. what its users perceive it to be (a newswire).
Every time someone tries to create a new platform that will finally open up the Internet to the long-standing promise of widespread two-way communications, the same thing keeps happening: The platform turns into a broadcast medium where a few use it to promote something and the vast majority sit back and consume. BBS systems, E-mail, USENET, almost all message boards, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You can change the protocol, make it Web-2.0, limit it to 140 characters, add AJAX, but you can't change human nature.
A major issue was over looked - twitter @username squatting.
For example, I registered www.ameristartup.com a few weeks back. At the exact time I was creating the Facebook page someone else created the @ameristartup twitter account. To date the twitter account has remained inactive (no followers, no following, no tweets, no profile pic, ect...). I naively notified Twitter thinking they would have interest in curbing this type of behavior, but I received the form corporate response of f-off.
This makes a lot of sense. For most users, it's a 1 way communication. Most of the 56% don't say a lot either. It's become very much a vehicle for people with things to promote.
To spin this positively, Twitter should be happy their platform is considered a "medium" and not just "one-thing" to all users.
The idea that your Twitter feed is an unfiltered firehose, and that you can use Twitter how you want (follow, tweet, or not) makes it all the more powerful and redundant to shifting consumer trends.
As long as Twitter doesn't hork the various tools/services used to access the service, no one should "get sick" or be fatigued by Twitter as there is not one standard experience.
A family member of mine just signed up for Twitter but didn't want anyone to know for various reasons (they are not interested in gaining a "following"). They just wanted to follow a few folks/entities they're interested in and that's it. This is a good thing ... Twitter remains "useful" without dictating how my family member and others has to use it.
The "hands-off" approach should also appeal to businesses looking to partner with, or provide tie-ins to the Twitter service.
I would argue the more lightweight and open-ended Twitter is in regards to how it works, the better.
It is the best RSS replacement. Let's me follow a lot of good sources, across multiple platforms. And not just sites, but individual, interesting people.
The DM feature? You can only message followers, kinda useless.
With RSS I just got the news/blog posts I care about, nothing more. Following people on twitter I get some good links but mostly a lot of noise about personal life crap I really don't care. Normally I stop following someone if the valuable links to noise ratio gets too low.
There's a neat feature in iPhone Safari. If you pull up the bookmarks page, there's an @ sign at the top, and that lists just tweets that have links in them.
Twitter is a replacement for RSS in the same way that DropBox is a replacement for running your own FTP server, both in terms of usability and liability.
The same thing you do with RSS/Atom feeds. They don’t magically disappear unless they’re deleted.
If you mean you think they would get buried under regular human tweets, you can make a list. I have a news list for this.
I gave up on Twitter several months ago. I never really got much out of it. I also quit using G+ after I stopped playing Ingress. Facebook is time-limited to 1 minute per day using the StayFocusd extension in my browser. I've also created email filters that send all social network notifications to the trash.
And that's the folly of most of these social sites. They send you so much data that it eventually becomes a cacophony, and you just want the noise to go away. Instead of searching for notification settings on the respective sites, it's far easier to filter emails (it takes me 5 seconds to create a filter in GMail).
There's a very fine line between meaningful engagement online and annoying nagging. I can see why Facebook is focusing on chat apps, because I think they've discovered that having a social network that is, at its essence, a layer on top of email is a losing prospect. A chat app is a channel outside email that isn't easily dismantled by a filter.
I have twitter, i find it useful. I follow local beer and burger guys. They always come up with great spots I've never been. Very useful. I also follow CEO's, which is also very informative. Its rare I feel the need to tweet myself, but that doesn't make me a less active user.
The "stream" concept only works if you have a lot of followers, which most people do not. For those with < 200 followers the chances if anyone reading your tweet before it falls down the stream is so small that it becomes a waste to even try.
I use Twitter feverishly (probably too much) - I probably annoy a lot of my followers with non-sequitur commentary and the random news article.
But what I REALLY derive value in, is it's my always streaming news source. Follow a dozen or so news sites (both local, world, and niche-focused, such as tech and marketing) and I'm always up to date on what's going on.
A well curated Twitter account is going to beat out almost any individual news source.
While I do know Twitter botting is a huge issue, I also (anecdotally) know a lot of people who only use Twitter for consumption who have never tweeted anything themselves.
I have been wondering what the value is of being continually up to date. One of my gripes with being on twitter is that you get to be up to date on things you don't particularly want to be up to date on. I wish there were an easy way to filter things out.
Considering the 1% rule of Internet culture (only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk), 44% sounds quite good.
Sites like Twitter and reddit (and HN, to a lesser degree) probably get a higher proportion of contributing users than your average forum or Q&A site by lowering the barriers to contributing.
For me, Twitter works for hyper-local things. All the local media personalities live-tweet council meetings and the like, local politicians and businesses have active twitter accounts.
It's great for contacting the public face of something in a fashion that makes it impossible to handle the matter privately. Every business or elected-official is super-gracious and accommodating on Twitter because the world is watching.
There's still a use case for non-sending accounts. Compared to email Twitter is a nicer way to receive promotional info. Senders are forced the keep their messages short, and there's no management time needed on the receivers part. I wish email headers would have a promotional & auto-delete/expire date tag for emails (of course it wouldn't work as companies would ignore it...).
In my country noone uses twitter I know. I only used it once to message Digital Ocean why are they so slow. It worked out better than I expected, they responded in 5 mins and I could see others with the same problem. Other than that I really don't know why would I use it. I think for me reddit multis are the perfect solution.
I assume that some (probably small) proportion of this 44% has used their account for direct messages, DMs, but these can't be detected? Also, how are protected accounts factoring into these stats? I couldn't find a link to the data itself and the article didn't make it clear how these two factors are being handled.
To add to that, I've seen a fair number of short usernames with few or no followers/following that were created early on. When I couldn't find the ones I wanted, I gave up and used my own name.
I think a lot of those accounts were mopped up by folks who then lost interest or forgot their credentials/lost email addresses etc...
If there is an dead account which never had any sort activity, is there some legal/moral way to get its username? I would like to buy it, but owner does not respond. There is also no trademark violation, so I can not use official way Twitter handles this cases.
I've got less than 100 followers, most of them folks like @ToasterRepairDotCom and @PeoriaJobHunters
If I were to start sending tweets, I'd just be the electronic equivalent of the guy who hangs out on a bench in the park near my house muttering under his breath all day.
I don't even understand how to get started with Twitter. I might know like one person in real life who actively tweets. My only real exposure to Twitter "in real life" is through using it to post status updates/outages.
So this looks like a powerlaw curve with a fat head and a short tail. I don't see this as a big deal - this means that 56% of people have engaged with a service. I think most people would be happy with that.
this is a bit worrying, the news article claims that these are still active users regardless but as far as I know, I get random tweets from bots and strangers promoting their own thing and largely I don't have a very active engagement with Twitter.
Is it that difficult? I got @kyan released for my company after several years of inactivity through a simple request, although I suppose it helped that we also own kyan.com and could prove we were actively branding ourselves as Kyan.
I don’t believe we hold any registered trademark. We’d been branding ourselves as simply Kyan for over 5 years before gaining the Twitter handle, although our registered company name is Kyanmedia (which was our previous handle). The account had a few followers and a profile picture uploaded, but either had never tweeted or was private.
I actually filled in the trademark form ( https://support.twitter.com/groups/56-policies-violations/to... ) even though we were just branded as Kyan and not officially trademarked as such. I seem to recall from the help documentation somewhere that an account that hasn’t tweeted in the last six months is more likely to be up for grabs in this way, although I can’t find that reference now. Either way a couple of confirmations were all it took to move from @kyanmedia to @kyan.
I've found that when I don't want a response I can file a bug report or send an email. When I do I can publicly whine on twitter and @-someone.
It sorta feels bad to do but it really does work.
The use case I'd like to use twitter for is trying out some jokes/"deep thoughts", but I don't have enough followers so I just tweet them to the wind and I'll never how just how unfunny I really am. I can definitely understand why most people would use it as a follow-only service - it's somewhat depressing to knowingly broadcast to (almost) nobody.
[1] Wow that's been a word for at least five years. I guess that's not too surprising...