Category — twitter

This one really had me in splits

The story behind it: http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-12-19/twitter-wins-300-million-alwaleed-investment-amid-site-revamp.html

It’s been a long while since I last wrote a blog post and that’s precisely the reason why I am here. Suddenly realized that I(too) have a blog which despite me hating it, has been neglected for a long while. While making a comeback, what’s easier than a rant .

I’ve been using twitter for a fairly long time now, almost from the month(or so) it was launched. Despite being using it for that long a period and having my twitter stream open most of the day I’ve never  tweeted a lot, and by ‘a lot’ i mean excess of a dozen fairly distributed tweets a day. Different people have different definitions and clearly for some 10-12 tweets isn’t much. At times I wonder about people who tweet a lot(say 25-35 times a day or more) and mostly end up judging them(not the best thing to do but). What are they like in professional life, in real life(assuming they have one)?

I see lots of wannabe entrepreneurs using twitter heavily to network, RT others tweets, sharing links etc or asking for things which Google could answer better and faster. Then there’s a bunch of what I call “Micro Celebs”, the celebrities of the world of 140 characters whose only claim to fame is there number of followers on twitter or how many achievers or real life celebrities follow them back there. What’s amazing is that these people continue to Tweet/RT the same old things, they used to when they started an year or two back. But luckily what works for them is the fact like search traffic on the internet, there’s always enough audience for them on Twitter, which probably explains why the ones who tweet a lot tend to have more followers.

Most people in my TL who tweet a lot work for some or other company and start tweeting almost the minute they reach their office and continue till the time they head back home. I wonder if they tweet this much and this frequently, how do they get any work done at all. But then,as I’ve seen and experienced myself, you don’t need to get a lot of work done in a big MNC to survive.

Anyways I feel some people(ambitious ones at least) should spend a little less time tweeting about what they are eating/drinking/feeling and instead think how addicted they have become and the things they can get done in that time..

With more and more people from India jumping the Social Media bandwagon, local brands are not standing on the edges anymore and have slowly started to test the Social Media waters. Reliance  Mutual Fund seems to be a new kid on the block. I happened to get the following mail from them yesterday

“Accept Button”?
Curious, I tried to check out what they had to offer and here’s what how things stand. The link takes you to their MF site that has the same icons in the tiniest size possible in the most invisible place possible

And here’s what you get when you click the icons

Facebook:

Twitter:

Orkut:

These screenshots pretty much tell the Social Media story for Reliance MF, which is so typical for most companies that are trying to be there but are no where near the optimum experience. It will take them some time and effort to understand there’s more to Social Media than reposting links and hopefully they’ll get hang of things before they run into a Nestle Like crisis

Amongst all this hype of Twitter and how tons of companies use it for customer service etc it never really occured to me that how Twitter isn’t doing anything noteworthy to interact with its customers and offer them support/help.

Though there is an account http://twitter.com/twitter, people using it never talk to Twitter users.

It started a while back when I noticed a couple people in my timeline complaining about getting tweets(appear in their timeline) from people they don’t follow.

Those must me RT’s I thought and dismissed it but then I saw this tweet,

Refusing at first to admit that it must a bug in Twitter, I thought it just might have got something to do with list feature but on further inquiry, that too turned out to be not the case.

As it turns out there’s a bug in Twitter due to which people are seeing random tweets from people they aren’t following. Let’s see how long does it take people to realize this and for Twitter to fix it

Also, apparently there’s another even more irritating part of this bug in which some people are getting these tweets from people they aren’t following via SMS.

A look around the public timeline confirms the existence of the “Random Tweets” bug.

and a look at this tweet tells us that this has been going on for a couple of days now

This would probably be the first sighting(for me at least) of a Twitter equivalent of an Orkut

“frandship request”.

Ladies Beware..

Update: Sighted another ‘frandship request’ (Thanks @jasdeep for the hat tip)

Have a look at the Twitter search result page below.

Can you see something missing ?

Ever since we had search.twitter.com ( I think after the summize acquisition) I’ve always wondered how come there isn’t a link to go back to the Twitter home page from the search result page. Though it makes PERFECT sense that there should be a visible link to the main page on the top section of the result page or at least the Twitter logo should redirect to the main page , none of them exists.

Instead they have a inconscpicous little “Twitter Home” link at the page footer which I bet would be hardly used.

Thinking aloud, could it be that ever since Twitter acquired Summize they never really thought of putting the Twitter homepage link which was missing in Summize(it didn’t need a home page link as it was just a search tool and search can be done the search result page too).

For those of you who joined the Social Media bandwagon late, here’s what  Summize looked like.

(Image credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/toprankblog/)

familiar to the F?

What do you think about this, a missing chunk of usability resulting from oversight or something else ?

Any guesses how much time does it take for a typical user to figure out @replies ?

Curious about how many people feel the same way when they use Twitter for the first time, I ran a search on
“what is twitter” and here’s what I found

This is the reason why Twitter’s audience retention rate(percentage of people signing up who return the following month) is 40 %  (via Nielsen)

While we wait n watch what (if at all) Twitter is doing about this, Let’s see
what you think can be done to improve their retention rate ?

Twitter being spreading like wild fire is under a lot of experimentation for marketing and since there isn’t a way to advertise or sponsor stuff “Mentions in Tweets” is the way to get eyeballs along with “Treding Topics” and a few other things. Also, since the trending topics started appearing on every user’s home page, the desire to find a spot among top 10 has soared.

Want to get visibility on Twitter ? Get trending, and the way to be trending is by having enough mentions in tweets.

Add this desire to be mentioned in as many tweets(interesting or boring, happy or sad, sensible or nonsense, related /unrelated to the product or company) to the fact that most people will do just about anything to win something for free (especially if it doesn’t ask them to get up from their chairs) and you get a viral campaign like moonfruit‘s.

Apparently there was a similar campaign by SquareSpace a month back but it failed to make it big because it wasn’t offering the phone but a $199 worth gift certificate but I am not complaining as atleast with SquareSpace’s campaign I got saved from the heavy spam attack that Moonfruit campaign led to.  For me the moonfruit campaign is no different from one of those spam attacks in which people randomly started adding some keyword in every tweet, which eventually led to those topics/keywords being in the trending list.

It’s not that I hate all twitter campaigns, for ex: I appreciate Tweetboard’s campaign, asking people to request for Alpha accounts for their service by tweeting(just once) in a given format instead of submiting their email id’s

TweetBoard

Now that’s a creative and non spammy way to market using Twitter.

Getting back to #SquareSpace and #MoonFruit campaigns, I’d say this isn’t a particularly good way to market because

1) It’s spammy and so all over the place. More than liking I’d hate if everyone in my stream started putting a random keyword in their tweets. There chances of winning something are a lot less than chances of loosing a few followers/friends. I certainly wouldn’t appreciate my company name in tweets like this

2) It’s not a scalable model:  While SqureSpace, MoonFruit and a few more might be able to get some eyeballs because of these campaigns I strongly believe this won’t be a scalable/easily followable model as if more companies start doing this then we’ll  have  a spoiled twittering experince and almost all the trending topics would be full of these promotional keywords which certainly won’t be liked by Twitter and it’s users and would invite some fixes to avoid such things, which’ll in effect led to a reduction in such campaigns.

3) I doubt if there’ll be significant value addition due to such campaigns: Though some of the statistics could look great after such a campaign I doubt if there’ll be a real value add for most companies that do such campaigns. For ex: I doubt if there’ll be a significant increase in moonfruit’s business or more people will start interacting with @moonfruit etc. Most probably the gift hungry crowd that gathered at their doorsteps  would move to a new free gift location in no time, shattering their false hopes.

That’s how I feel about various marketing campaigns on Twitter, what do you think about them ?