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Tuesday, June 3, 2014

What The Twit?

OK, all you authors on the Twitters, I may be alone on this, but I'm going to rant for a second.

Both on my dedicated writing Twitter and my personal twitter, I'm constantly getting follows from authors or musicians who've subscribed to those 'we'll get you thousands of followers' bot services. They work by taking control of your account, following a gazillion people, and hoping that some appreciable percentage of those people follow you back.

Which, it looks like, tends to work, within a narrow definition of 'working'. These accounts will often have upwards of ten thousand followers; unfortunately, they're also following upwards of ten thousand accounts themselves (which is the nature of the scheme.) Or twenty thousand. Or twenty-seven thousand. Twenty-seven thousand seems to be sort of a 'sweet spot' for these kind of accounts.

Which means even if the actual meat person associated with the twitter account actually uses it, they're never going to see my tweets. They'll be lost in the noise. They're certainly not going read a given tweet, consider, and click on the link to go read my fiction. I suppose it's possible that some marginal percentage of the people who end up following them back actually do read their tweets and click through, but what could possible motivate me, a content creator, to opt-in to this deal?

I don't follow any of those accounts back, ever. I've seriously considered adopting a policy of isnta-blocking any account with more than a thousand follows. Blocking does seems like a very 'nuclear' option. Who knows, some of these people might clean up their act.

In the meantime, consider: a follower that doesn't read what you're posting is worthless except as a tiny percentage of an ego boost.

I'm not certain it's even possible to leverage twitter followers into a reading audience instead of the other way around. Most of my followers (on the writing account) are writers. Which makes it a community of writers as opposed to an audience. Not that there's anything wrong with a community of writers. It's just important not to mistake the one for the other. I see a lot of writers advertising in their streams. To the point of spamming. To a following of maybe a hundred other writers.

That's not going to help. It'll get you concrit, I suppose, if any of the writers are actually reading your stuff instead of just hoping you'll read theirs.

Anyway, rant over. Facebook, with its hiding your page's posts from the vast majority of your 'fans' is even worse for small-audience content creators.

Still trying to figure out this social media stuff. More later.

2 comments:

  1. Ah, the social media. It is or has been getting a tad out of control. I opened Twitter because I was curious about what all the fuss was and Facebook wasn't using hashtags at that time. I have to admit, I went a bit crazy at first, following every singer/songwriter/band that I have adored over the last 37 years. Then I calmed down and took a look around. I like that it has a limit on the characters typed. I wouldn't say I have a huge fan base, and I'm almost certain that most of the people I am following, I have found through blogs, or I have actually used the sites I follow. I've never tried anything that gets me more readers. Think I'll stick to how I have been doing it. Feels more personal that way. I know not everyone clicks to my page to see what I've written, but I do have a few loyal followers and I think that's good.

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    Replies
    1. It's definitely difficult to manage all the things a writer has to deal with above and beyond the writing. Luckily I have some more experienced help advising and noodging me via Facebook message.

      Thanks for weighing in! :)

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