Subscribe RSSThis morning, John Reese deleted his Twitter account and sent an email saying he thinks Twitter is on its way out.
Even, though, my follower count has risen, the response to my tweets has been on a steady decline. The reason is simple… There’s just more and more noise on Twitter. People are following so many people that single tweets are easily missed in someone’s timeline.
I haven’t tracked response to my tweets…well, actually I do have some stats, but I haven’t paid enough attention to them to be able to confirm or deny whether I’m seeing the same thing. But yeah, because of overfollowing, it’s probably true.
I wonder, though, whether John is seeing a decline in total response, or just a decline in response rate as a percentage of his follower count — that’d be interesting to know.
John continues:
…no matter how little I may have used Twitter, it would still be robbing my focus. I’d still always wonder if someone had “@” messaged me to ask me something or if something else needed my attention. And THAT is what would have kept me constantly checking it multiple times a day like I had been.
That sounds like the too many in boxes problem. I subscribe to my tweet stream (including @replies) in my RSS feed reader, so I don’t have to visit Twitter or use a Twitter app separately.
Of course, if I were fauxlowing too many people, all that’d do is clog up my feed reader. But I don’t. In fact, I recently dropped several follows that weren’t delivering enough value, and now I’m down to 21 (it was 22 till John deleted his account).
I’m not saying John is wrong. Maybe Twitter isn’t right for him. And sure, response rates aren’t likely to stay as high as they used to be. But I believe Twitter will remain useful to people who use it right.
If you’re getting too much noise, unfollow the noisy people. If you’re seeing spammy tweets, unfollow the spammers (and don’t auto-follow).
I guess the one problem area is replies, because (as far as I know), if you’re watching your replies (”mentions” actually), there’s no way to block spam there — at least not without third party tools…hmm, maybe a new feature to add to Fauxlowers.com?
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March 2nd, 2010 at 11:25 am
Twitter isn’t dying – however, there is more competition.
It’s not enough to sign up and call yourself an expert or to produce twitter guides that could be produced by a kindergarten student. These days, like any other business, you have to know your audience, prove your value (through content, originality, creativity etc.) and literally be “outstanding”.
Early adopters had an easy time standing out… they didn’t have to compete as much to do so. Now there is competition and some people are picking up their ball and going home. I’d say that speaks far more to the skills and talent of the individual than it does to the platform.
March 2nd, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Laurie,
Exactly — it’s just like how email marketing has gotten more difficult since you have to compete with so much spam and the hype-filled autoresponders used by many marketers.
Whether or not to continue using Twitter comes down to 2 questions:
1) Can you still get a positive ROI.
2) Could the time and effort it takes to use Twitter be better spent elsewhere.
John’s email went on to talk about Facebook being more effective and to hint at something new coming from income.com. I trust that he wouldn’t have deleted his Twitter account simply as a publicity stunt if he still valued it very much, though I’m sure he’s going to get as much value out of having done so as he can — no reason not to.