Is Your Twitter Stream Polluted?
Is anyone else dissatisfied with Twitter lately?
Reading a post by Brian Solis the other day, I realized that I’m not the only one who’s seen quality drop exponentially in the past few months, following the one million + new users who’ve joined in the past few months.
As the late great Christopher Wallace touted, “mo money, mo’ problems;” indeed, Twitter is faced with a big problem: it’s popularity has brought an entirely different community of users, and with it a host of bots and money-scheming phantom accounts.
The question, then, is will the conversation stream become diluted, or worse, drained, by these empty users?
A mind shift needs to occur. The more people equate number of followers with authority, the further down the drain this community is going to travel. Only by managing our community can we continue to make this space a valuable resource. Take a few minutes and sift through your followers– you may find that a good chunk of them are wasted space.
~ by Brandon Carlos on April 29, 2009.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: Brandon Carlos, PR Ninja, social media, Twitter
While the popularity of twitter has exploded since @aplusk and his millionth follower crusade, there’s one thing about twitter that should NEVER make it polluted for users. That’s selecability. You can select who you follow. And by that simple fact, you can read what’s important to you and not worry about the “I just ate a bannana and hit up @aplusk and said holla” posts. Spy bots are one thing, but just because there are more people using the service that aren’t PR, media, comms types, doesn’t mean that it’s polluted. Twitter is like a coffee filter for online content. What you want to digest gets through, everything else is captured and thrown out.
@bigguyd – Yes, you can filter who you follow, and what I’m suggesting is that not nearly enough people understand the importance of filtering your list. The proof is in the pudding, bigguy: how on earth could a bot have 1000+ followers without 1000+ dummies playing the “follow me, follow you” game? I don’t think Twitter needs to become as strict with following procedure as, say, LinkedIn– after all, part of Twitter’s cool factor is in the ability to hyper-network, often with people you don’t know at all. There needs to a shift, though, in the way we monitor our followers if we are going to continue to enjoy charting these waters.