It's called Twitter for a reason

As long as I’m talking about Twittering, I have two Twitter accounts—one is my “professional” one, where I follow and comment on things like Agile product development methodologies, software and companies I’m interested in, and news affecting the high tech sector. The other is associated with my blog, so I follow whoever seems interesting and occasionally comment on things that strike my fancy.

Just like I do, you know, here.

The thing about Twitter is—there is a freaking 24x7 tsunami of absolute, idiotic, pointless, badly-spelled crap out there. Being on the “business” side is no defense from this, because there are plenty of self-proclaimed “thought leaders” (God give me strength the next time someone introduces him/herself to me as that meaningless term, because all I want to do is shove a fistful of infographics down their throats) who spew and re-spew factoids and injunctions on how to capitalize on this or that trend.

The worst offenders are the “thought leaders” in “social media”. They’ve got bots churning these things out at a rate of knots, and when they’re not tweeting, they’re retweeting crap like you wouldn’t believe. And by “retweeting”, I mean not only do they RT the maxims of others, they just take what they sent out a few hours ago and post them again, either as something new or a RT.

Yes, they RT their own tweets.

If someone retweets a post of theirs, they retweet the retweet. If someone mentions them in a tweet, they retweet. It’s all about getting your Twitter handle in the feeds of your followers, your little avatar in their faces.

On my professional account, I follow about 300 people. Most are in the SaaS software and social fields—they’re the ones who automatically follow you if you follow them. The socialites are also the ones tweeting at least 500 times per day. Some work for companies I’m interested in; since they have actual, you know, jobs, they’re somewhat more measured in their output.

Even so, after going away and returning to Twitter after a few hours, it's not possible for me to actually read all the hundreds of tweets and retweets that have accumulated in my feed. I have no idea what people who are following tens of thousands of twitterers do.

(I’ll say that it’s also interesting how tech companies use social media. I don’t follow companies on Facebook, because that’s not where you find B2B engagement. But when I follow a, say, SaaS company specializing in tag management and big data analytics, which only has 700 followers and 1400 tweets…well, they’re not really taking advantage of the platform. But it’s hard to point that out to them in an interview. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to play well when you tell them they’re not actually sitting at the cool kids’ table in this regard. At the least, they’re not taking a systematic approach to expanding their reach, which—if done right—should cost them not very much and at least gain them some social street cred. Just sayin’.)

I admit to being a mere padawan in this field. So I find it interesting that I’ve figured more out about it than some companies who tout themselves as being on the bleeding edge of some bleeding edge technology.

I’ll speak tomorrow about some of the specific crap that comes my way—mostly via the blog-related account.