Sunday, November 22, 2009

Tweeting is for birds

Twitter is becoming ever more popular, but I for one am not a fan of twitter. Millions of Twitterers (I am resisting the temptation to shorten that to “Twits”) just chirping mostly pointless “tweets” every day, or re-tweeting other tweets. But to me the verb tweeting is linked to a bird (and in fact it’s the twitter logo) – not the most intelligent of animals. Granted I do not know much about birds, but as far as I know they just ‘tweet away’, and there is little communication going on between the birds. And this bears a striking resemblance to Twitter.

‘Followers’ are supposed to read your tweets, but seeing the sheer amount of tweets I can not see how. Many of the followers are network marketers who never take any notice of your tweets. They are busy following people to boost their follower count and send marketing messages when you follow them back. Twitter is great for teenagers to follow every move of their pop idol, but for business communication or marketing I fail to see the point.

Oh, and please follow me on twitter.com/ngalea :-)

17 comments:

Zena said...

That was funny and true and i shall retweet :)

Anonymous said...

I tend to agree, I have a twitter account and the idea is to post latest news and articles for others to follow. But again, how can someone follow your tweets if they follow over a thousand people at the same time. The funny thing about this is that most of my tweets are re-tweeted. and this is great but once again, I fail to understand what twitter is all about. But there again, why do men wear Ties. Useless but they still wear it :)

Nick Galea said...

Thanks for your comments! And yes, why do we wear ties, well it makes us feel smart i guess :-)

Unknown said...

Heh! I never used Twitter. I have opened Facebook account (for experiment) but never use it also. May be this is in my mentality, but I cannot understand what's benefit of all this social buzz... Really!
I love email and ICQ, but I simply cannot understand why I have to post photos or write stupid comments on somebody's "board". I overwhelmed with my business information already and do not want to litter may brains with one more useless "service".

Nick Galea said...

Hi Igor,

Actually i quite like facebook - i think its a lot better then twitter because you tend to be more 'choosy' who you accept as a friend and so you get far less updates and only those that interest you. If facebook would improve their fan pages (i.e. easy URLs etc) it could be usable for a business too.

DV said...

Very disappointed by this post. Birds do not just Twit but they do other things!

Here are some details on bird copulation! You really need to inform yourself a bit more.

Bird Copulation:
http://people.eku.edu/ritchisong/avianreproduction.html

Anonymous said...

@David
Yehh you are right, most birds can make quite a tasteful meal too. So they are either flying (and tweeting) sitting on a tree branch (and tweeting) or in my plate (not tweeting) :)

Nick Galea said...

Good one! :-)

Anonymous said...

Nick, to a certain extent you can add URL to Facebook. The difference is that only your "fans" can view them, but if used well, you can use Facebook to market your site. I am sure you have a fan page for 3cx, if you post links to your page and get people to comment on it, then it will automatically be shared to all the friends' friends on facebook and might escalate to quite alot of views. the links will also include the picture on the site and more. So yes, facebook is ideal for business too. I recommend putting a FAN BOX on your site to get followers in (unless you think it is tacky).

Nick Galea said...

Thanks for the comments on facebook - yes we do have a 3CX fan page. Its not rocking the web server just yet, maybe in future :-)

Wayne Hewitt said...

Facebook is mega powerful... believe me... and those social networking 'snobs' who don't us it are.. ummm... twits...

Unknown said...

LOL @ David. Yeah birds are so useful - a section of Malta use them for target practice for instance.

@Nick as for the popularity of twitter: its growth is flattening and possibly even declining http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007388

Nick Galea said...

Wayne - agreed on Facebook! Brian - interesting stats, so i am not alone in this :-)

Matt Landis said...

Nick, were you really worried about windows? Microsoft misses a beat every other time but always recovers balance! ;-)

Chrome? Bah humbug!

take care
matt

Nick Galea said...

Hi Matt!

Well worried would be a big word, but I do feel it was time for Microsoft to focus on its core product - Windows. Lets hope it retains that focus....

ZXT said...

Hey Nick I'm following you now...follow me back. Just like you I only have about 250 people following and less than 200 following me back. and I do read Tweets of those I follow.

BTW, do you know if Kim Kardahshian will accept payment for her Tweet it will earn her $1.5k per Tweet?

I think advertisers believe in Twitter.

Nick Galea said...

Hi ZXT

At 1,5k each tweet i would be tweeting a lot more :-) But seriously i believe advertisers will only really start investing as the quality of the tweets improves.