Twits, Tweets, & The Future!

Unless you've been under a rock for the last few years, I'm willing to bet someone has asked you if you use Twitter. If not, you've at least heard of it.

For those few of you remaining who don't know much about it other than the icon on your favorite websites, this is Twitter in a nutshell. It's a microblog. Essentially, a user gets 140 characters to express something that then goes out into the ether of the web. A user collects followers who receive and hopefully read the messages called "Tweets" while in turn seeking others to follow and read their tweets.

Here's the good. Twitter was designed to be used on standard mobile phones so it does not require a data package. Creating and sending a post is as simple as sending a text. In fact, that's all that's necessary. It can be sent from there to update Facebook. This allows a user to create status updates from anywhere. That's a real plus.

One thing I will say about Twitter is that it does an excellent job of driving web traffic. Putting a link in a tweet is an almost sure-fire way to send people to the site. The results are far better than anything seen on Facebook, MySpace, or other social media. I've done experiments with this. I compared days I put one of my domains in a tweet. For three months, I alternated using Facebook alone to promote a page with sending one tweet with the link. The results were staggering. On the Twitter days, traffic was an average of three times the number of unique visitors of the Facebook only days. The reason I did it for so long was to allow for some variation for the subject matter of the tweets. Results were consistent when averaged.

When Iran was descending into chaos, Twitter was the only source of news getting out of the country. Media sources relied on tweets from the people to find out what was happening. By it's very nature, it's hard to shut down or block without shutting down all mobile communication and internet providers.

Twitter is not without its weaknesses. If you start to follow a lot of people it takes all day to read all the tweets to see the one or two out of the whole list worth reading. This is especially true since tweets are usually even more mundane than Facebook status updates tend to be. Very few of these microblogs are actually worth reading. I'm sure I'm not alone when I say this: I don't care about Ashton Kutcher's hair.

I quick glance at the top users list should be enough for anyone to figure out who really uses the service. In the top twenty, only President Obama (#4) and CNN (#19) have even the slightest chance of providing useful information. The rest of the list is mostly drawn from our cult of celebrity worship. I really doubt that anyone over sixteen really cares what Lady GaGa or Justin Beiber (numbers 1 and 2 respectively) have to say in their tweets.

That said, I've seen a huge gap in regular Twitter users. The generation you most likely guessed would be the heaviest users, young twenty-somethings, are among the smallest groups. When asked, most of them see it as useless. To tell the truth, I don't entirely disagree with them. With mobile technology getting better and cheaper by the day, a text-based media is just not that useful for most people. Why use Twitter to update Facebook when you can update it directly from your phone without the character limitations?

That may be the death knell for Twitter. Smart phones are increasing in use plus the growth of extremely portable notepad computers is eliminating the need for text-based media. I don't think it will happen overnight, but I can see the beginning of the end. It will not be many years from now when Twitter will go the way of MySpace and begin to fade into obscurity.

Unsocial Media: More Facebook Changes

I wasn't planning to do another piece on Facebook so soon but here we are. Once more, I need to start with a disclaimer: I am a proud capitalist. I believe in making a profit but I don't like having the rules changed in midstream.

This may not affect most of you directly unless you have a page for a business, band, or any page beyond just your personal one. Even if you don't have a page like this of your own, you're still affected by the recent changes.

Many of you may not have noticed the first change. A couple of months ago, several of us involved together in a project were trying to spread the word about what we were doing. At the time, I was the only admin on the page and I suggested that all of my friends "like" what we were doing. This went pretty well. We discovered the problem when the rest of the team and a few other friends tried to do likewise and couldn't. The "Suggest to Friends" link wasn't there for anyone not an admin. Open a new tab and go to Facebook and look. Odds are, you won't see it either. I've checked it from two personal profiles of my own and had many others check it too. It's just not there.

Isn't that just wonderful? I bet you noticed that the number of pages suggested to you dropped off significantly. Maybe you didn't but I'm betting you have after reading this. One simple change and a regular person can't recommend someone or something they like or support to others who might do likewise. For example, let's just say you found a local band you really like and want to tell your friends about it. Before the change, all you had to do was recommend their Facebook page to your friends. Easy, right? You can't do that anymore.

Not that it matters. Even for those of us with pages, those suggestions now just go out to the ether and are never noticed by the intended recipients. This is different now too. There was a time when if you sent out a request to friends to become a fan, which is what it used to be called, there was usually a pretty good response. Because of all the format changes and things that Facebook has done with the site, the intended recipients likely never even see the request.

I remember getting a notification when someone recommended a page just like when someone commented on a post. That is no longer the case. I still have it set up to send me an email when someone suggests a page to me. Checking my logs, those emails stopped suddenly a couple of months ago. I admit, this is really frustrating.

Maybe you're saying, "So what? I don't have a band or a business. I'm not hurt by this." That's really only true if you don't believe in anything which I really doubt. For those of us who do have pages to connect with fans or clients, it really hurts us a lot. It was already frustrating not being able to invite fans to events unless they were friends or send actual messages to them instead of bulletins that they would never see. Ultimately, all of us are hurt when businesses, not-for-profits, and others can't get their message out beyond the people the ones who own the page already know.

It has come down to this. The only way to use Facebook to grow is to buy an ad. That's it. It's all about the dollars. Spend money or die. Your fans can't tell people about you and what you're doing. If you try to tell your friends, they never see the request. Trying to communicate with the people already a part of the fan base is more difficult than ever. So, it really is down to buy an ad or die.

Again, I am a capitalist and proud of it. I believe in making a profit including from advertising. I'm not opposed to buying ads on Facebook. What I don't like is being forced. There are alternatives, like using event invitations to ask people to "like" the page, but these are of limited impact and not nearly as effective as page suggestions.

I admit that I find the irony delicious. While claiming to believe in free and open communication for all, Facebook execs are making decisions that greatly restrict that same communication. For a while, it really was free and open but not anymore. All these major changes restricting what used to be a free and open system while six of them move up on Forbes' billionaire list. Again, I'm fine with wealth. I just want it to be made ethically and truthfully. I don't like it when things used to work one way and then they don't without any notice to the people involved. If we had been told ahead of time about the extent and meaning of the changes I might be less frustrated.

For future posts, I am going to look for other media that may just be the next big social media site. Let the search begin.