It’s funny- just as I was settling in to write this, the Mashable squirrel scampered past, so of course I had to follow it to the Information is Beautiful blog.
These are the graphical depictions (based on the data from previous surveys – InsideTwitter and the PearAnalyticsstudy, according to Mashable):
Information is Beautiful Twitter Stats
This is what struck me:
Only slightly more women than men are on twitter (55% v. 45%).
Only 5% of twitter users are loudmouths; couldn’t tell from the graph the gender split. I guess I would be categorized as a loudmouth.
Of that 5%, 32% are bots. And I guess thinking about botmerde was what had motivated this post to start out with. I try to review all new followers, although I am at the point where that is getting unwieldy; the first 1000 are slow in coming, but after that you get a snowball effect. Anyway, I got to one, and it looked like all botted tweets- no @responses, nothing engaged. I checked his website link, and that was exactly what it was- ads for TweetLater and tweetadder peppered the site.
I keep reading things like, “Make $1000 in your First 7 Days!” Dang! I could use the jing. But I also don’t have one second extra to invest in a smoke-and-mirrors machine. I read Mark Tosczak’s post What I Learned Experimenting with Automated Tweets, and, at least for driving blog traffic in his instance, he noted the inefficiency of the system.
What I am wondering is this. How effective is an advertising account in twitter? Is ANYONE making any money from this?
If you aren’t achieving your objective- making money- why persist in this practice?
The people who set up these accounts do not see me as a human being; I am seen as a member of their farm, someone to toss tweets to in the hopes that something sticks and they make money from me. I expect this from the television set; it annoys the hell out of me on twitter. In television, there is an implicit contract- give me entertainment, and I will (possibly) sit through your ads.
There is no contract with twitter spam- I am not receiving a thing. If there were some way that I could charge the people who run botmerde through their twitter accounts for my time I would. A pay-per-click aggravation charge for each unsolicited automated tweet received- is there an app for that?
If ANYONE really makes any money annoying the crap out of other people, please email me with the details. No, not really.
August 18th, 2009 on 6:34 am
Thanks for the mention. For what it’s worth, I think it’s possible that people who are getting thousands and thousands of followers (probably mostly by courtesy follow-backs), may occasionally get some click-throughs on Twitter. But for me, most of the people I was following (and who were getting my automated tweets during my experiment with those) were fairly sophisticated and were interested in true conversation and sharing. For a small number of them, then, the automated, somewhat self-promotional tweets were seen as unwarranted and unwanted.
Those sorts of ‘thanks for following me’ tweets are still common, but I’m doubtful that most people are making a lot of money from them.
August 18th, 2009 on 7:00 am
I am wondering how many of those followers you would have to have to actually make an appreciable amount of money. Maybe there is some kind of return; it’s free, except for the time you put into it, and there is no similar opt-in platform elsewhere. Who would sign up to get junk mail?