When you find yourself scrolling through your Twitter feed, what types of things make you stop to read them? If your feed is anything like mine, you most likely follow too many people and organizations to be able to touch on every single post. Even less, if like me, you only look at it every few days…or weeks…or months. Honestly, I’ve never been too keen on Twitter but understand certain aspects of its usefulness. Here is a live look at what my feed looks like right now:
Yeah…boring. However, not so boring in the eyes of Li & Bernoff. They state in the book that Twitter was able to catch on quickly because it is simple. They state that “signing up is trivial. Posting an update is a piece of cake” (pg 197). They also go on to state that it interfaces with cellphones and allows for on-the-go updating (pg 197). That is great and all, but can you tell me of any other social media applications that could also fit that description? If you guessed “most of them”, congratulations – you are correct.
There were so many topics that could be touched upon out of chapters 9-12, but I keep coming back to this curious interest in Twitter specifically. Why not Facebook? Does Facebook not harness the same types of principles? Is it not as effective, if not more so? Why would these 140 character snippets draw attention from the authors? The authors list the elements that they believe make Twitter an important and influential tool. They are: Followers, Hashtags and Searches, Mentions and Retweets, Links, Lists, & Apps and Tools (pg 197-199). Can you name one particular tool from this list that is not available on nearly any other popular social media platform today? Yeah, me either.
So I finally grabbed the book to look at the dates and see that the Second edition was published in 2011 and the first was published 2008. Alright, makes sense…at these times, Twitter was the only platform that implemented many of these communication methods. But today, you can see that both Facebook and Instagram also implement these methods as well. If things like hashtags were so unique, but are now commonplace – where exactly does this leave your 140 character statement?
Well, if you are Davey Alba – writer for Wired.com – 2017 is going to be the year that Twitter shapes up or ships out. Alba writes that “tweaks [made to the Twitter application] have had virtually no effect on Twitter’s bigger problem: making itself a mainstream social network able to appeal to a wider public, much less one that’s grown to have the same kind of stature and influence as Facebook” (Alba). So even today, people recognize that Twitter is a niche – but it is a niche with influence. Li & Bernoff point out that only about 7% of the population actively use Twitter but of that 7%, most users at three times as likely to be a creator. (pg199-200). Has that changed since 2011? Would a platform such as Instagram, that allows almost anybody to become a creator (in a sense) not fare better than Twitter in this area? I’m not sure, but assuming that it hasn’t changed we can begin to understand how Twitters sphere of influence quickly outpaces platforms such as Facebook.
I still think that it would have been useful to take a few extra chapters to break down other platforms as thoroughly as they did for Twitter, but it really did leave me with a better understanding of how stacked the technographics are in favor of the creators in this instance. Personally, I think this has really made me re-evaluate its usefulness. I’ve always taken a passive interest in the sense that, I can understand that Twitter is important on some level, but still unsure if it is important to ME.I think that the authors do a good job of really explaining why Twitter is special and how we can all apply the fundamentals of the groundswell to this application. I’ll be really interested in how their perspective has (or has not) changed in an inevitable third edition of this text someday in the future.
