Twitter Power: Book Discussion
I bought the book brand new back in 2009 for $27.00 (with taxes) from Borders (the bookstore where I hanged most of the time). I bought it at the time because my friends were talking about signing up on Twitter and when I saw this book, I was planning to learn about what made Twitter anymore special than Myspace & Facebook where I was an extremely active user back then. But lots of things happened in life to keep me so busy that I literally abandoned my accounts on both Facebook & Myspace; and I just never read this book or had the time to sign up on Twitter until now.
Recently I've been starting to open up my moving boxes that I had ignored since I moved to this town few years ago... I can't believe it's been years and I haven't completely unpacked yet. I found this book in one of the boxes filled with books, I started reading and I also signed up for Twitter.
Now I had finished reading this book, I'd like to get rid of it to make space. If you are interested in having this book, please go to my Bookshelf Clearance page to buy it at $0.01. Yes, books aren't worth buying brand new, as you can see. But my weakness is: I never cared about the money I spent until I ran out of it, like now...
What this book doesn't really tell you: Following others on Twitter doesn't mean they will follow you back. Hearting others' tweets also doesn't mean they will see your presence on Twitter either. Don't take this personally because there are so many bots on Twitter, it's highly likely that you are just following a bot or hearting a bot's auto tweets or retweets. Bots aren't real users on Twitter so they don't see or respond to humans. This is one of the reasons why I miss the Myspace era when it was really easy to connect and socialize with new people on the internet; when most users on Myspace were actually human beings.
If you want to share your opinion about this book, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment area below.
On pg. 182, this book talks about how to increase click through using tweets, meaning posting a sequence of tweets about a certain subject or story line and then post a tweet with a shortened link to a page where a product is sold or to where an ad is run, or to wherever you want to lead your followers to.
ReplyDeleteAs a new user on Twitter, I don't like to read a sequence of text tweets...I just don't have the patience for any tweet that can't tell me a clear message or story with 140 characters or less. A sequence of tweet that goes on and on to become a story is just too much for my attention deficit disorder.
As for click-through. I'll never click through any link whose actual url is shortened and masked by a shortened link. This is because I'll never visit any site that doesn't have https://; and I'll never click on any link that I'm not sure is safe. I screen all urls before I click, so if your site's actual url is masked by a shortened url, I won't click on it. Or, if your site's url doesn't begin with https:// , I won't even want to test it for malware. I just won't bother with it.
To be honest, what makes Twitter not as fun as my first experience with social media like Myspace and Facebook many years ago is: the huge number of promotional text tweets, retweets, and shortened product link tweets that spam my Twitter timeline through tweets.
May be this tweet sequence and link strategy works with the average Twitter users, but definitely not on me. Yet, I consider myself to be the average Twitter user. I'm not really the sophisticated user yet since I'm pretty new on Twitter....May be the longer I'm there, the more I'll be receptive to marketers' spamming promotional tweets and retweets. I doubt it...
"It lets you attract lots of followers by tweeting about popular topics, and it means you can tap a known market." pg. 184
ReplyDeleteI feel that this advice on how to attract followers on twitter overstates the "ease" of attracting followers. It underestimates the intelligence and skepticism of the average Twitter users. Take me, the typical average Twitter user as an example, I usually don't pay attention to what's trending on Twitter. So if you are going to tweet with the most popular #hashtag, hoping to attract me to follow you, you are out of luck. I don't pay attention to what's trending on Twitter because whatever is trending there, is never what I'm interested in. Most of the time, I don't even know what those hashtags mean. So I definitely am not going to stick a hashtag #梅雨入りat the end of my tweet, even though it's trending on Twitter. What kind of followers I'm hoping to get anyway? Are they even humans? Many automated bots use this tweet strategy that the book recommends and therefore there are a lot of spam tweets in the "trending topics" sent out by bots. So you end up attracting nobody by being a participant.