RSSFriday B.S.: Friend or Follow?
Mar 05
Humor, Life in Digital Comments Off
You know the feeling you get when you’re showered and freshly wiped and yet the inside of your butt cheeks still feel wet and you irrationally think it might be poop even though it’s probably just moisture? Welcome to Friday B.S. We know exactly how you feel.
I’m barely hanging on to the twitter train. Twitter to me is kind of like a puzzle. I can see the picture on the box and it’s pretty and I want to put it all together, but then I shuffle through the individual pieces and I just can’t figure it out.
I signed up for twitter for the same reason I signed up for facebook. I’m not an entrepreneur, but I am a writer. There’s something to be said for being able to connect with fans of all ages. For entrepreneurs, social networking represents a free way to advertise your wares. All you do is generate a shortened url to a product you are selling, and presto, tweet the link to your followers / post the link to your wall and you’re in business. But for someone in the public eye, it is also a convenient way to extend your reach. You can interact with your fans in short, contained bursts that have a minimal amount of drain on your day to day life but maximum amount of impact on expanding your brand. 
But you might have noticed what I didn’t say. I didn’t create my profiles in order to meet new friends. I didn’t create profiles in order to find people from high school that I had long since buried in the graveyard of people I barely remember, whose names spark only the vaguest recollections of times long since passed. I didn’t make a profile so my parents could keep tabs on me, or I could post photo albums from last weekend, or to become a fan of my favorite bands. All of that stuff happens, but it’s ancillary to my intent. And it always has been.
When I first started using twitter, I would post jokes as I thought of them. Then I started to post when I was drunk. Then I discovered the hashmark and started posting things like
Woke up at 1am to I Wanna Dance w/ Somebody blaring and thought ‘What are my roommates doing?’ Wasn’t them. #falselyaccused
Then I realized that since I am a writer, I should be advertising my books. So I started posting links to the sales page, and updating my followers on the writing process, and tweeting every time I wrote a new blog post. Then I started taking random pictures and posting them with a caption (like this morning, the one of the car I parked next to with the trash barrel in the passenger’s seat and some kind of alien glob coating the side mirror). And finally, after all this time, I just tweet about whatever random thing I’m doing at the time.
But here’s what I don’t get. Why do you care? I barely care about the minutiae of my own life.
The latest wrinkle is follower-farming. Essentially, huge lists of followers who will follow you back. It’s a great idea, I guess, if gathering together a huge following is your thing. But what’s the end game?
The only way to find out is to try it. So I gamely signed up to follow 1,000 new accounts, and lo and behold, just 24 hours later, I have whopping 1,000 new followers myself. It worked as promised. But as far as I can tell, the vast, vast majority of the people I’m following don’t post any original tweets. They retweet crap from other people, post advertising links and sometimes just post lists of their own followers. Over and over and over again. Then there are the select few that tweet quotes from famous people. Over and over and over again. What the fuck? Why? Please someone explain it to me. First off, how is that a good use of the tweeters’ time and energy? And second off, really I mean really who is actually reading your tweets with genuine interest?
Let’s forget about social networking as a means of personal expression. If you’re the kind of person that regularly updates your facebook status or tweets about your day -- that’s a legitimate use of the tool. Instead, let’s talk about entrepreneurship. My friend, someone I respect greatly, has said more than once that twitter (and facebook) are free means of advertising. But the message is untargeted and gets lost among this vast network of people who aren’t using the social networks for what they were intended for. Am I wrong? If I tweet a link to my book to 1,000 followers, have I succeeded in piquing their interest in my product or my brand? Are my 1,000 followers, themselves ostensibly entrepreneurs, as interested in my product as I am in theirs (if so, hooboy! I’m in trouble.) I really don’t get it. Not only do I not get it, I’m reasonably certain that my advertising attempts through social networking aren’t going to result in book sales except from people who were already inclined to buy my book in the first place.
Despite all this, I really like connecting with people through facebook and twitter. For every five or so friends or followers I have, there is one that I’m glad to be in contact with. For the rest of it though, I just don’t know what to think. The twitter train is moving pretty fast, but I’m not entirely certain that I even need to be on board.
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Andrew Marx is the author of Accidents Happen. You can follow him on twitter.
