I have to admit it. I don’t really understand Twitter and I think only a few of my friends are doing anything useful with it.
I don’t count myself among those doing anything worthwhile with Twitter! But my friends at CHFI and 680 News are being smart about it. They post some personal stuff, sure, but that’s interesting to me because they are friends. But they also use it to promote what’s happening on their radio stations. They remind people about contests and top news stories and drive listeners to the radio. That makes sense to me.
This week a person (or persons) involved with a broadcast-related enterprise started “following” my updates so I decided to “follow” them, too. Within an hour I saw the error of my ways! They were posting updates every few minutes and clogging up my tweet board. I just don’t know why I would need or want to know every thought that goes through the head of another human being and why that human being would think they were so fascinating! It reminds me of John Tory’s political team. They used to send out several news releases a day, thinking that saturating the media would guarantee them coverage. What it actually did was numb us to seeing Tory’s letterhead. It created so much work for us to weed through an endless stream of useless crap and find the occasional worthwhile nugget that we started actually almost ignoring him altogether. Not consciously, really. But it became like, oh gawd, ANOTHER release from John Tory!! It’s the Cry Wolf syndrome.
I prefer Facebook to Twitter, by far. I’d rather see some photos and links to stories that tell me what people are actually thinking and caring about. I’ll keep tweeting, for now, but I really don’t have anything interesting to say. That doesn’t seem to stop other people, though, mainly strangers whom I’d never encounter outside of Twitter. Maybe there’s something I just don’t get. But I’m not going to tweet about it!