What's Really Killing Twitter

I first joined Twitter in 2007, thanks to a client campaign activity, and was managing and maintaining their Twitter handle for few months. A year later, I personally got active on Twitter. 

My Twitter experience has been 3 stages..

Stage 1: Era of egghead DP & many personal tweets. Yes, it was that time in India, when you could send your tweet through SMS, using a basic feature phone.
Stage 2: An era of relevancy… when most fake profiles disappeared from the follower list, the tweets were relevant to the news/topics/people that were of interest to me, 
Stage 3: Era of confusion.. Today, I’m not sure why my Twitter timeline means to me. It is a hotchpotch of GIFs, Videos, crazy #tags, irrelevant tweets

Of late, Twitter has been in the news for all the wrong reasons…

  • Their earnings are down
  • User base is mostly stagnant and in some geos contracting
  • A lot of senior management people are leaving

These are signs of an organisation that is ill, very ill.

While the reasons for the downslide of Twitter are many, from WhatsApp, Pinterest, Instagram, to no proper monetisation model, to limitations of the platform itself… I have some thoughts on Twitter’s current illness

  • Laissez Faire Syndrome
  • Aldous Huxley Syndrome
  • Downtown Syndrome

As most other social media platforms, Twitter too started with a policy of being hands-free. Regulations and interferences from the company was/is by and far few. The underlying philosophy being that in a participative platform, self regulations will come to play. Unfortunately, as it happens with governments and with management, Laissez faire system best works when the people at large are homogeneous & have common interest in mind. Many social platforms evolved by putting checks and balances (with Facebook being the prime example) in place at right time

For me, two things that stand out in the book, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley,
  • the  fear of losing one’s individual identity, and 
  • how we pay a premium (sometimes with our freedom) to live a life of order, when chaos becomes too much to handle
Twitter for many have become a chaotic place, and thus to bring to order, people are either migrating to other platforms or logout of it. Also, what happens on social media tends to impact our real lives. Our behaviour is impacted by how many retweets, likes, shares, we get..the response to the posts, etc. Our virtual identity dictates our real life behaviour. Many have started the process of reclaiming and taking control of their lives & taking it easy on multiple social media platforms happens to be one of them

One of the prime reason we stereotype downtown areas to be bad and dangerous is due to few incidents that are more than average. It is just due to a handful of people that the whole place gets vilified. Same is the case with trolls and abuse mongers on Twitter. Being an open platform, there are many instances when people with narrow mindset and wicked intentions try and create arguments and upset lot of people (esp famous personalities). This deliberate provocation makes lot of active twitter users and large twitter base to step back & in extreme cases go out of Twitter..thus reducing the charm of Twitter

(I have made-up the above syndromes with my limited ‘creativity’. I know there could be more appropriate names for the same.. please suggest of any better titles)


As you await your treatment, I say a little prayer for you, Twitter

In the meantime, if you are interested in getting tweets and update about Ecom, digital marketing, branding, and advertising.. you can follow me on Twitter @Zentosh

Cheers!


Santosh

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Best Indian websites - 2007

Image
Hi, This was an article that appeared in PC World India Nice stuff Santosh ------------------------------------ Technology will dominate the future and the web is clearly one of its greatest manifestations. Forget the dotcom bust that many sceptics will remind you of The Web is going to become our way of life in India . There are enough statistics to point to the rapid growth of the Internet in India – number of connections, e-mail accounts, transaction revenue – all very convincing. But who needs statistics? Just a quick look around will reveal how web is fast replacing traditional brick-n-mortar operations. Be it picking new stocks or new friends, finding a job or a bride, there’s a web way to things that is proving far more effective, and rewarding. Websites today are built with robust understanding of users and available technology. They purposefully pursue fulfilling the needs of their audience but are grounded in strong business reality. And hence, unlike the fairy-tail era gone
Read more

10 Reasons Marketing Strategy should include the Internet

It may seem surprising but many companies, big and small, have yet to develop a rational Internet marketing strategy. Considering the Internet has now been used effectively by marketers since 1994, any organization without a strategy to utilize the Internet for marketing is probably making a big mistake. For any organization that still does not have a meaningful Internet marketing effort we offer 10 Reasons why you should. 1. The Go-To Place for Information Possibly the most important reason why companies need to have an active Internet marketing strategy is because of the transformation that has occurred in how customers seek information. While customers still visit stores, talk to sales representatives, look through magazines, and talk to friends to gather product information, an ever-increasing number of customers turn to the Internet as their primary knowledge source. In particular, they use search engines as their principle portal of knowledge as search sites have become the leadi
Read more

Teach Marketing, Yoda Can

Image
About 8 years back, I wrote an analogical article about Kung Fu Panda and digital marketing (you can read it here ). That time my kid was 3 years. Now my kid is 11 years old. As all growing kids do, he too has out-grown the Kung Fu Panda-The Lion King phase. His current fascination is The Star Wars. I guess, by now, he must have finished watching at-least 3-4 times….The Star Wars Saga - the original, sequel, and prequel trilogies, animated series, The book of Boba Fett, The Mandalorian, and even the Thrawn trilogy books. The next on his wish list is to own an original lightsaber… Kids are demanding! Well, this article is not about my kid or his love for Star Wars. Working from home and watching these movies along with my kid, this is about my thoughts on what Star Wars can teach us about marketing, or more importantly what marketing tips Yoda can teach “Do or do not. There is no try.” We all know that planning is very important when it comes to any campaign/project. But every great pl
Read more