Social media- social= just another ad

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.

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Comments

Twitted by anwayne says:

August 18, 2009 at 12:50 am

[...] This post was Twitted by anwayne [...]

Mark Tosczak says:

August 18, 2009 at 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.

HeyAmaretto says:

August 18, 2009 at 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?

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